FYI, I will be on C-SPAN this morning at 9:15 ET.

Chapter 2: The Courtroom Showdown

The Old Senate Chamber in Washington was warm for January, the heavy air thick with coal smoke and anticipation. On January 26, 1886, two men prepared to argue before the most powerful court in America. One represented the largest corporation on the continent. The other represented a small California county fighting to collect its taxes.

The outcome would shape American democracy for the next century and a half.

The Railroad’s Champion

S.W. Sanderson entered the chamber like a man who owned it. And in a sense, he did. The chief legal counsel for the Southern Pacific Railroad stood more than six feet tall, an aristocratic bear of a man with neatly combed gray hair and an elegantly trimmed white goatee. For more than two decades, Sanderson had made himself rich litigating for the nation’s largest railroads, defending the interests of oligarchs like Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker, Collis Huntington, and Mark Hopkins.

Sanderson was famous enough that artist Thomas Hill had included him in his painting The Last Spike, commemorating the 1869 transcontinental meeting of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads at Promontory Summit, Utah. In that painting, Sanderson appears portentous and dignified, standing among the railroad barons who had conquered a continent. He saw himself as their equal.

That day he would ask the Supreme Court to grant his corporate clients something they had been seeking for decades: the constitutional rights of human beings.

Sanderson had argued versions of this claim before. The railroads had lost every time. In 1873, the Court had declared that the Fourteenth Amendment’s “one pervading purpose” was “the freedom of the slave race.” In 1877, the railroads brought four different cases to the Supreme Court, arguing that they deserved constitutional protection as “persons” under that same amendment. They lost all four.

But Sanderson kept coming back. The oligarchs he served had unlimited resources, unlimited patience, and unlimited ambition. They would keep filing cases until they found a way to win.

The People’s Advocate

Santa Clara County’s lawyer Delphin M. Delmas was everything Sanderson was not. Where Sanderson was large and imposing, Delmas was small and unimposing, a fastidious man known to wear a frock coat, gray-striped trousers, a wing collar, and an ascot tie. He had a substantial nose and a broad forehead only slightly covered with a wispy bit of thinning hair. He looked like a clerk, not a gladiator.

But in the courtroom, Delmas transformed. His voice thrummed with emotion. He was nationally known as the “master dramatist of America’s courtrooms,” and by 1904 would be called “the Silver-Tongued Orator of the West” when elected a delegate to the Democratic National Convention.

His courtroom performances were legendary. The nation would later learn just how brilliant he was in 1908, when he successfully defended Harry K. Thaw for murder in the most sensational case of the first half of the century, later made into the 1955 movie The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing, starring Ray Milland and Joan Collins. Luther Adler played Delmas.

But on this January day in 1886, Delmas was not yet famous. He was simply the young lead attorney for Santa Clara County, California, a small government entity suing the massive Southern Pacific Railroad for six years of unpaid property taxes.

While Sanderson had spent his career serving the richest men in America, Delmas had always worked on behalf of local governments and ordinary citizens. He had passionately argued, pro bono, before the California legislature for a law to protect the nation’s last remaining redwood forests. He was fiercely defensive about the rights of natural persons, of actual human beings, against the artificial creatures of law that sought to usurp their place.

For Delmas, this case was about something far larger than taxes. It was about whether corporations created by state law could claim the constitutional rights won by flesh-and-blood human beings who had fought and died for independence and then triumphed over the South’s brutal oligarchs in the Civil War.

The Stakes

The case itself was almost comically trivial. The Southern Pacific Railroad owed Santa Clara County approximately $30,000 in back taxes on property with a $30 million mortgage. That’s like having a $10,000 car and refusing to pay a $10 tax on it, then taking the case all the way to the Supreme Court.

One of the railroad’s defenses was even more absurd: when the state assessed the value of the railroad’s property, it had accidentally included the value of fences built by private landowners along the right-of-way. The county, not the state, should have separately assessed those fences. Therefore, the railroad argued, the tax was “unequal” compared to what they paid in other counties.

But the railroad’s lawyers had slipped something else into their arguments, something that had nothing to do with fences or tax assessments. They claimed that the railroad corporation was a “person” under the Fourteenth Amendment, entitled to the same constitutional protections as the freed slaves that amendment was written to protect.

If the Court agreed, it would transform American law. Corporations would gain the power to challenge any regulation, any tax, any democratic decision that treated them differently from human citizens. They would gain access to the Bill of Rights, to due process, to equal protection. They would become, in the eyes of the Constitution, the equals of the human beings who’d created them.

Sanderson’s Argument

Sanderson rose to address the Court. Chief Justice Morrison Waite looked down from the bench, a square-headed man with a bristly graying beard that shot out in every direction. Waite himself was a former railroad attorney who had never served as a judge before being appointed Chief Justice. He owed his position to President Grant, whose administration was so wracked with railroad bribery scandals that his own Republican Party refused to renominate him for the presidency.

“I believe,” Sanderson declared, “that the clause of the Fourteenth Amendment in relation to equal protection means the same thing as the plain and simple yet sublime words found in our Declaration of Independence: ‘all men are created equal.’ Not equal in physical or mental power, not equal in fortune or social position, but equal before the law.”

It was audacious. Sanderson was claiming that a railroad corporation, an artificial entity created by state law and owned by some of the richest oligarchs in America, deserved the same constitutional protections as freed slaves emerging from centuries of bondage. He was hijacking the language of liberation to serve the interests of concentrated wealth.

Sanderson’s fellow lawyer for the railroads, George F. Edmunds, added that the Fourteenth Amendment created a “broad and catholic provision for universal security, resting upon citizenship as it regarded political rights, and resting upon humanity as it regarded private rights.”

Humanity. The railroad lawyers were claiming their corporate clients were human.

Delmas Responds

When Delmas rose to speak, his transformation began. The small, fastidious man became something else entirely—a prophet of democratic rage: “The defendant claims that California’s taxation policy violates that portion of the Fourteenth Amendment which provides that no state shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” Delmas began, his voice thrumming with barely controlled fury. Such an argument, he said, “if tenable, would place the organic law of California in a position ridiculous to the extreme.”

Then Delmas went on the attack:

The shield behind which the Southern Pacific Railroad attacks the Constitution and laws of California is the Fourteenth Amendment. It argues that the amendment guarantees to every person within the jurisdiction of the State the equal protection of the laws; that a corporation is a person; that, therefore, it must receive the same protection as that accorded to all other persons in like circumstances . . . ​. To my mind, the fallacy of the argument lies in the assumption that corporations are entitled to be governed by the laws that are applicable to natural persons.

Delmas reached for the ultimate authority, the book that the Founders themselves had consulted when writing the Constitution: Sir William Blackstone’s 1765 Commentaries on the Laws of England. He quoted Blackstone: “Persons are divided by the law into either natural persons or artificial. Natural persons are such as the God of nature formed us; artificial are such as are created and devised by human laws for the purposes of society and government, which are called corporations or bodies politic.”

Delmas moved from legal authority to common sense. If a corporation was truly a “person,” why could it not make out a will or get married?

“This definition suggests at once that though a corporation is a person, it is not the same kind of person as a human being, and need not, nay, in the very nature of things, cannot enjoy all the rights of such or be governed by the same laws. When the law says, ‘Any person being of sound mind and of the age of discretion may make a will,’ or ‘any person having arrived at the age of majority may marry,’ I presume the most ardent advocate of equality of protection would hardly contend that corporations must enjoy the right of testamentary disposition or of contracting matrimony.”

The Heart of the Matter

Now Delmas reached the heart of his argument. Everyone in that chamber knew the history of the Fourteenth Amendment. It had been written to protect freed slaves, to ensure that the men and women who had been held in bondage would have the same rights as their former masters. The blood of a civil war was still fresh on the ground. The memory of slavery was still alive.

He continued: “The whole history of the Fourteenth Amendment demonstrates beyond dispute that its whole scope and object was to establish equality between men, an attainable result, and not to establish equality between natural and artificial beings, an impossible result.”

Delmas was trembling now, his small frame vibrating with righteous indignation. He was a California Democrat who had spent his life fighting for the little guy, and he knew, as did anyone who read the newspapers of that era, exactly what the Fourteenth Amendment meant and why it had been written.

The Fourteenth Amendment, he declared, “is as broad as humanity itself”:

Wherever man is found within the confines of this Union, whatever his race, religion, or color, be he Caucasian, African, or Mongolian, be he Christian, infidel, or idolater, be he white, black, or copper-colored, he may take shelter under this great law as under a shield against individual oppression in any form, individual injustice in any shape. It is a protection to all men because they are men, members of the same great family, children of the same omnipotent Creator.

In its comprehensive words I find written by the hand of a nation of sixty millions in the firmament of imperishable law the sentiment uttered more than a hundred years ago by the philosopher of Geneva, and re-echoed in this country by the authors of the Declaration of the Thirteen Colonies: Proclaim to the world the equality of man.

The Mission of the Amendment

Speaking of the object of the Fourteenth Amendment, Delmas laid it out plain:

Its mission was to raise the humble, the down-trodden, and the oppressed to the level of the most exalted upon the broad plain of humanity, to make man the equal of man; but not to make the creature of the State, the bodiless, soulless, and mystic creature called a corporation, the equal of the creature of God. . . ​.

Therefore, I venture to repeat that the Fourteenth Amendment does not command equality between human beings and corporations.

The bodiless, soulless, and mystic creature called a corporation. Delmas had found the phrase that captured exactly what the railroads were asking for: to make an artificial creation of law the constitutional equal of a child of God.

The Warning

In closing, Delmas issued a warning. This case, he suggested, could be one of the most important in the history of the United States. If corporations were given the powerful cudgel of human rights secured by the Bill of Rights, their ability to amass wealth and power could lead to death, war, and the impoverishment of actual human beings on a massive scale.

“I have now done,” he said. “Yet I cannot but think that the controversy now debated before your Honors is one of no ordinary importance.”

The chamber fell silent. Delmas had laid before the Court the full stakes of what the railroad was asking. He had traced the history of the Fourteenth Amendment from the American Revolution to the blood of the Civil War to this moment, from Declaration of Independence to the liberation of enslaved human beings to the attempted liberation of soulless corporations.

The question was whether the Court would listen.

The Long Wait

A year and five months passed while the Supreme Court debated the issues in private.

In that time, the railroad oligarchs waited. Leland Stanford continued expanding his empire. Collis Huntington continued buying politicians. The Southern Pacific Railroad continued to refuse to pay its taxes, its lawyers confident that their strategy would eventually succeed.

And then came May 10, 1886.

That afternoon, in the same Old Senate Chamber where Delmas had delivered his passionate defense of human rights, Chief Justice Waite prepared to announce the Court’s decision. Delmas was there. Sanderson was there. The fate of American democracy hung in the balance.

What happened next would not become clear for another eighty years. The crime was about to be committed, and it would be hidden in plain sight for generations.

Delmas had won the argument. He would lose the war.

A Discovery Across Time

I searched for the better part of a year for copies of the arguments made in the Santa Clara case. The Supreme Court kept no detailed notes of oral arguments in those days. Most of what was said in that chamber was lost to history.

Then, in an antiquarian bookstore in San Francisco, I found a treasure: Speeches and Addresses by D.M. Delmas. It was a hardbound collection that Delmas had personally paid to self-publish in 1901, containing his most important courtroom arguments, including his full presentation before the Supreme Court in the Santa Clara case.

Holding that book was like holding a time machine. Delmas’s arguments were as brilliant and persuasive as any words that Erle Stanley Gardner ever put into the mouth of Perry Mason. Here was the voice of a man fighting for the soul of American democracy, preserved across more than a century.

He was right about everything. Corporations were artificial creations of law, not natural persons. The Fourteenth Amendment was written to protect freed slaves, not railroad barons. Granting corporations constitutional rights would distort American democracy for generations to come. It could even empower a would-be dictator to take over America with the help of corporate money.

Delmas saw it all, warned of it all, fought against it with every tool at his disposal.

And he lost anyway. Not because his arguments were wrong, but because the fix was already in. The conspiracy was already underway.

What Delmas could not know, standing in that courtroom, was that Justice Stephen J. Field was sitting on the bench with a plan. Field had already ruled repeatedly (including in the Santa Clara case) as a circuit court judge in California that corporations were persons under the Fourteenth Amendment. He owned railroad stock. He socialized with railroad executives. He harbored presidential ambitions that he hoped the oligarchs would finance.

And he had a friend in the court reporter’s office.

The Scene of the Crime

The crime took place in Washington, DC, but its seeds were planted in California, where the most powerful corporation in America was waging war against democracy itself.

The Dawn of the First Progressive Era

To truly grasp the scope of the crime of 1886, you first have to understand what America was becoming at the time, and what the oligarchs were desperately trying to stop.

The 1880s started what historians would later call the First Progressive Era. After decades of unfettered corporate power following the Civil War, leading to brutal practices against workers, Americans were finally waking up and organizing. This rise of the new power of labor and communities demanding progressive changes had that era’s oligarchs terrified.

By 1886, the Knights of Labor had grown to seven hundred thousand members, which made it the largest labor organization in American history. Workers, who’d been treated as disposable, were discovering their collective power and demanding an eight-hour workday, safer working conditions, and an actual living wage so they could support their families with dignity.

States were also beginning to regulate corporations in serious ways. These included new laws that limited working hours, required basic safety standards in factories and mines, and taxed corporate property to fund public schools, roads, mass transit, and other infrastructure that would benefit ordinary citizens beyond just the morbidly rich.

Farmers were organizing into state-based cooperatives, pooling their resources to escape the stranglehold of the railroad shipping monopolies and grain elevator cartels. The Grange movement had already won major victories in several states, confirming the newly recognized principle that state governments had the power to regulate corporations by citing the “public interest.”

In short, the seeds of the American Dream—the promise that hard work would be rewarded with security and dignity, that ordinary people could own their own homes and businesses, that children would have opportunities their parents never had—were just beginning to sprout. The Progressive Era that would transform America and create the world’s first widespread middle class was dawning.

The oligarchs and “conservative” politicians of that day well understood what was at stake. If this movement succeeded, if workers gained real power, if states could effectively regulate corporate activities, if taxes on the wealthy funded public goods that lifted all boats, then the era of rampant, unchecked corporate dominance would end. The railroad barons, the steel magnates, and the banking titans (among others) who’d accumulated unprecedented fortunes would have to share that power with America’s democratic majority.

The oligarchs thus needed a weapon to fight back. They searched for years and finally found it in the Fourteenth Amendment, written to protect freed slaves but now soon to be perverted to protect corporate profits and oligarchic wealth.

The Railroad Oligarchs

In the 1880s, the Southern Pacific Railroad wasn’t just a company: it essentially functioned as if it were a government unto itself.

The railroad controlled California’s politics completely. Its executives owned senators, judges, governors, and newspaper editors. It had its own police force, its own courts and jails, and its own laws. When the railroad wanted something, the railroad got it. When it didn’t want something, that thing didn’t happen.

The men who owned the Southern Pacific—Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker, known as the “Big Four”—were America’s first oligarchs (other than the Southern plantation owners who’d tried to overthrow democracy and were defeated in the Civil War). They weren’t just rich; they wielded their wealth as a weapon to bend local, state, and even the federal government to their collective will.

Stanford would later found Stanford University, laundering his reputation through philanthropy, the way many oligarchs have done ever since. But that came later; in the 1880s he was a railroad baron who saw democracy as an infuriating obstacle to ever-increasing profits and a challenge to his own personal wealth and political power.

And his railroad had a problem. California counties, under pressure from voters, were passing legislation that taxed railroad property to pay for public improvements including schools, roads, and bridges. The railroad barons, incensed, called this theft. They’d built their empires via federal land grants (Lincoln gave them tens of millions of acres during the Civil War), political corruption, and absolutely ruthless business practices. The idea that local communities could tax them to fund the common good seemed, to these railroad oligarchs, like an outrageous violation of their rights.

Most importantly, those taxes weren’t just about revenue; they were also about power. They were about democratic communities saying out loud that they could control the corporations that operated in their territory. They claimed that corporations existed to serve public purposes, not the other way around.

If California could tax the railroads to fund public schools, the oligarchs reasoned, then children of workers might get educated. Educated workers would know how to demand better wages. Better wages would cut into railroad profits. If these affronts were allowed to stand, the whole system that kept the oligarchs on top might start to unravel.

So, Stanford and his buddies decided to manufacture a constitutional right that didn’t exist: the right of corporations to be treated as “persons” under the Fourteenth Amendment. It was a preemptive strike against the Progressive Era before it had even fully emerged.

The Amendment Written in Blood

The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, just three years after the Civil War ended. Its purpose was singular and clear: to guarantee that freed slaves would be recognized as full citizens with constitutional rights.

Section 1 contains the key language: “No State shall . . . ​ deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Over six hundred thousand Americans died in the Civil War; the Fourteenth Amendment was drafted in their blood. It was meant to ensure that the Black Americans for whom the war was fought would be protected by the Constitution. It was meant to guarantee that the promise of America—that all men are created equal, that every American deserved a chance at what Jefferson called “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”—would finally apply to all Americans, regardless of the color of their skin.

The amendment carried the potential for real power, and it had already begun to transform the nature of America through Reconstruction, so the railroad oligarchs decided to exploit and corrupt it for their own purposes.

They’d tried before. During the first two decades after the Civil War following its ratification, corporations brought case after case to court, arguing that they were “persons” entitled to Fourteenth Amendment protections and thus access to the Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments to the Constitution). They lost. Repeatedly.

For example, in 1877, in Munn v. Illinois, the Supreme Court explicitly rejected the idea that corporations had the same rights as natural persons. Chief Justice Morrison Waite wrote for the majority that corporations were subject to “regulation . . . ​for the public good.” Although they had a limited form of what today we’d call artificial personhood so they could sign contracts and pay taxes, they were not protected as if they were human persons under the Fourteenth Amendment.

That decision was a victory for democracy. It affirmed what the Founders understood: that corporations are creations of law, subject to democratic control, not autonomous entities with the same “inherent rights” recognized for humans in the Bill of Rights. It meant that each of the states could regulate businesses in its own way, tax them fairly, and require them to serve the public interest.

If Munn v. Illinois had remained the law of the land, the reforms of the Progressive Era that followed might have been easier to achieve and harder to reverse. The American Dream might have taken root even earlier, and today we’d probably be far ahead even of Europe’s most progressive democracies like Norway and Denmark, since we would have had such a huge head-start.

That failing, the oligarchs needed a new strategy.

The Tax Case

In 1882, the Southern Pacific Railroad simply stopped paying property taxes in several California counties, claiming the taxes were illegitimate. The counties sued, and the railroad fought back with an entirely new legal argument.

They claimed that those California counties’ tax assessment methods violated the Fourteenth Amendment because they treated railroad property differently from other property, and that different counties had different tax rates. This “unequal protection,” they argued, violated their rights as “persons” under the Constitution.

The case was Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company. It worked its way through the lower courts for four years and finally reached the Supreme Court for the 1885/1886 term.

The railroad had advantages that most litigants lack. They had unlimited money for legal fees, political connections to judges and politicians, and, most importantly, they had something else: a friend on the Supreme Court itself.

US Supreme Court Associate Justice Stephen J. Field was a Californian who’d made his fortune during the Gold Rush. He owned railroad stock, socialized with railroad oligarchs, and believed, passionately, that corporations deserved constitutional protection from democratic governance.

Field’s vision could be described as feudal. Like Edmund Burke generations earlier, he believed a small class of property owners should rule America, protected by the Constitution from the whims of the democratic majority. Wealth, he believed, was proof of goodness, wisdom, and competence, and poverty was a failure of the will.

The emerging middle class of the late mid-nineteenth century threatened this vision, in Field’s view. Workers organizing into unions, farmers forming cooperatives, small businesses openly fighting the monopolies: all of this had to be stopped.

Field had been waiting for the right case, and Santa Clara would be it.

It started in 1883 because back then Supreme Court judges also “rode the circuit,” working in their states as chief judges of the appeals courts most months of the year, and just spending a few months every year in Washington, DC, as justices of the Supreme Court.

So, in 1883, that case first came before Field in his capacity on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. He ruled in favor of the railroad, writing in his decision:

The Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution, in declaring that no State shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction the “equal protection of the laws,” imposes a limitation upon the exercise of all the powers of the State which can touch the individual or his property, including that of taxation.

The “equal protection of the laws” to any one implies not only that the means for the security of his private rights shall be accessible to him on the same terms with others, but also that he shall be exempt from any greater burdens or charges than such as are equally imposed upon all others under like circumstances. This equal protection forbids unequal exactions of any kind, and among them that of unequal taxation.

Once Santa Clara County appealed their loss in the 9th Circuit, the case came before the US Supreme Court with Field himself as one of the men sitting in judgement.

The Oral Arguments

On January 26, 1886, the Supreme Court—with Justice Stephen J. Field in attendance—heard oral arguments in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company. J.C. Bancroft Davis, the Court’s official reporter, took the notes, as did the county’s lawyer, Delphin Delmas.

The railroad’s lawyers made their pitch, echoing Field’s decision in the 9th Circuit case: “The Fourteenth Amendment protects ‘persons’ from unequal treatment. Corporations are persons. Therefore, California’s unequal tax assessment violates the railroad’s constitutional rights.”

The county’s lawyers countered: “The Fourteenth Amendment was written to protect freed slaves who are actual humans, not railroad corporations. The framers never intended to grant constitutional rights to corporate artificial entities created by state law.”

Then something weird happened.

Chief Justice Morrison Remick Waite interrupted the arguments. According to court records, he made an announcement: “The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does.”

The county’s lawyer, trying to argue against the railroad’s assertion that they were “persons” protected by the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, was essentially told not to bother. The Court had already decided.

Or had it?

The Decision That Wasn’t

On May 10, 1886, the Supreme Court laid down its decision in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company.

Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote the majority opinion. It’s a technical, somewhat boring ruling about fence valuations and tax assessment procedures. The Court found in favor of the railroad, but not because of the Fourteenth Amendment; instead, it ruled that California had illegally included the value of the fences along the railroad right-of-way in the land’s assessment in violation of its own laws.

Here’s what Justice Harlan actually wrote in the Santa Clara opinion about corporate constitutional rights: nothing.

The Court’s decision explicitly avoided the constitutional question. The Court instead ruled on narrow technical grounds having to do with California tax law that had nothing whatsoever to do with whether corporations were persons under the Fourteenth Amendment.

In fact, Harlan’s decision begins by noting that since the Court could dispose of the case on other grounds, “it is not necessary to consider” whether the Fourteenth Amendment applies to corporations.

It doesn’t get more explicit: “it is not necessary to consider.”

The Supreme Court explicitly refused to rule on corporate constitutional rights.

So where did the idea that Santa Clara established corporate constitutional rights come from?

The Headnote

J.C. Bancroft Davis was the Supreme Court’s Reporter of Decisions, what we today call the court reporter. His job was to take notes and then publish the Court’s written opinions in officially sanctioned volumes, adding brief headnotes to summarize each case.

For Santa Clara, Davis wrote: “The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a state to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

That sentence appears before the decision itself. It looks official. It’s printed in the United States Reports, the official record of Supreme Court decisions.

But it’s not part of the decision. It’s not law; it’s just Davis’s statement. And Davis’s statement directly contradicts what the decision actually says.

The decision itself said the Court was definitely not deciding the corporate constitutional rights question: it was “not necessary to consider” because they were only going to rule on whether the county illegally counted the value of fenceposts when calculating the value of the land for property taxes.

The headnote, on the other hand, explicitly says the Court decided that corporations are persons.

One of them was clearly and blatantly lying. And since the decision was the official ruling of the Supreme Court, written by Justice Harlan and agreed to by the other justices, the liar had to be Davis.

Davis, we now can see, put words in the Court’s mouth—words the Court never said, using language that would alter the course of American history for more than a century.

The question is why?

The Cover-Up Begins

Within months of the publication of the Santa Clara decision, lawyers for corporations began citing it as precedent for corporate constitutional rights, pointing to the headnote instead of the decision.

Judges, seeing that citation in the official United States Reports, assumed it was accurate and, within a decade, began to rely on it. Soon, other cases were citing Santa Clara as having finally and firmly established that corporations are persons under the Fourteenth Amendment and entitled to the rights previously enjoyed only by humans.

Nobody, it appears, bothered to check the actual decision. Why would they? After all, it was right there in the official record, summarized by the Supreme Court’s own official reporter, a wealthy and powerful man with a well-known reputation who was the son of the Massachusetts governor.

In 1889, just three years after Santa Clara, corporate lawyers first successfully established that damnable headnote as precedent. In Minneapolis & St. Louis Railway Co. v. Beckwith, the Supreme Court cited Santa Clara, claiming in an actual decision that corporations are persons under the Fourteenth Amendment.

With that case, now in an actual decision by the Court itself and not just a statement by the Court’s reporter, the lie became the law.

And today, much to the detriment of both democracy and America’s working class, 137 years later, it still is.

What Was Lost

The fraud of 1886 didn’t just corrupt constitutional law. It altered the entire course of American history.

The Progressive Era still happened, and the labor movement still won important victories. The income tax was established. Antitrust laws were passed. Women won the right to vote. The First Progressive Era, from the 1890s through 1920, identified crucial reforms, most of which just made America’s oligarchs even more determined to fight back.

And when the Republican Great Depression showed what unrestrained corporate power really meant—banks failing, families starving, millions homeless—Franklin Roosevelt reinvented American politics and economics to create the Second Progressive Era, what he called the New Deal. It included Social Security, the right to organize unions, regulations that prevented banks from gambling with depositors’ money, and a tax system that required the wealthy to pay their fair share.

By 1981 when Reagan was sworn into office, the American Dream was real for fully two-thirds of Americans. A single income could support a family. You could buy a house for three times your annual salary. College was affordable or, in some states, even free. Healthcare didn’t bankrupt families. Retirement was secure. Children had better opportunities than their parents.

But throughout that entire period, Field’s and Davis’s doctrine of corporate constitutional rights remained embedded in constitutional law like a dormant virus or an unexploded landmine. The oligarchs had lost battle after battle during the Progressive Eras, but they succeeded in hanging onto their ultimate weapon: the fraudulent claim that corporations had constitutional rights.

When Ronald Reagan’s “conservative (neoliberal oligarchic) revolution” began in 1981, that weapon was activated. Corporate constitutional rights became the battering ram that destroyed the American Dream, piece by piece, decade by decade, until we arrived at today, when Millennials own just 4.6 percent of the nation’s wealth compared to the 21.3 percent Boomers owned at the same age, and our president is openly dancing to the tunes of major polluters and fossil fuel corporations in exchange for campaign contributions and gifts.

The railroad oligarchs and their shills of 1886, J.C. Bancroft Davis and Stephen J. Field, planted a bomb in the Constitution. It took five generations to fully detonate it, but when the oligarchs of the 1970s and 1980s finally did, it laid waste to almost everything the Progressive Eras had built.

Understanding how that bomb was planted—and who planted it—is critical to knowing how to defuse it.

That’s what brings us to the triggerman: J.C. Bancroft Davis.

The Crime Scene

How Corporations Stole Human Rights in 1886

THE CASE

Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company,
US Supreme Court, 1886

Actual issue: A county sued a railroad over $30,000 in unpaid property taxes.

THE CONSPIRATORS

THE TRIGGERMAN: J.C. Bancroft Davis, Supreme Court Reporter
Former railroad president • Railroad stock owner

His crime: Wrote a fraudulent summary claiming the Court ruled corporations are “persons”

THE MASTERMIND: Justice Stephen J. Field, Supreme Court Justice
Railroad stock owner • Friend of railroad oligarchs

His goal: Corporate constitutional rights through decades of failed court cases

THE FRAUD:

WHAT DAVIS WROTE: The Headnote: “The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the Fourteenth Amendment . . . ​”

THIS IS NOT LAW: Headnotes are summaries with no legal standing.

WHAT THE COURT ACTUALLY RULED: “It is not necessary to consider” whether the Fourteenth Amendment applies to corporations.

THE COURT REFUSED TO DECIDE: They ruled only on a technicality about fence taxes.

THE RESULT: For 140 years, courts cited Davis’s fraudulent headnote as if it were law.

One lie became the foundation for

Citizens United: corporate “free speech” to buy elections

Hobby Lobby: corporate “religious freedom”

Corporate “privacy” to hide pollution and crimes

Corporate “due process” to block regulations

The Supreme Court never ruled that corporations are people.
A court reporter made it up.

Source: Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, 118 US 394 (1886)

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Prologue: A Crime in Plain Sight

Every law student in America learns the same story: “In 1886, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company that corporations are persons under the Fourteenth Amendment. This single decision fundamentally transformed American democracy, business, and law. It granted corporations the same constitutional rights as human beings: free speech, due process, equal protection. Everything that followed, from unlimited corporate campaign spending to corporate control of our media, politics, and environment, traces back to that pivotal moment.”

There’s just one problem: It never happened. The Supreme Court debated this issue and never made that ruling. Not in 1886, not ever.

What actually happened is far more disturbing: A court reporter, a corrupt Supreme Court justice, and the railroad oligarchs who owned America’s most powerful corporations successfully conspired to rewrite the Constitution. They committed the crime in broad daylight, recorded it in official court documents, and hid it in plain sight for 140 years.

This is both a detective story and a true crime investigation. Like all good mysteries, it starts with a discovery, mine, in a dusty Vermont law library on a cold winter day in 2002.

The Library Discovery

I thought I was confirming a fact. Instead, I uncovered a crime scene.

I was researching corporate power in America, working in the Vermont Supreme Court library six blocks from my then-home in Montpelier. Every legal textbook, every encyclopedia, every Supreme Court case for the past hundred-plus years cited the same precedent: Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company (1886) established that corporations are persons under the Fourteenth Amendment.

The reason I was in the library was simple: I wanted to read the actual decision, not summaries, not commentary, but the words the Supreme Court actually wrote.

The Vermont Supreme Court library contains one of the most comprehensive collections of legal documents in New England. Librarian Paul Donovan pulled down Volume 118 of United States Reports: Cases Adjudged in the Supreme Court at October Term 1885 and October Term 1886. The book was published in 1888 by Banks & Brothers in New York, written by J.C. Bancroft Davis, the Supreme Court’s official reporter.

The volume was heavy in my hands, its leather binding cracked with age, pages giving off that distinctive smell of vanilla and dust that old books possess, the scent of history itself.

I found the case—page 394. What I discovered there would change everything I thought I knew about American democracy.

The decision itself, the actual legal ruling written by Justice Harlan, said nothing about corporate constitutional rights. In fact, it explicitly stated that the Court was not deciding that constitutional question. The Court instead ruled on a narrow technical issue about fence-post assessments and California property tax law. Corporate constitutional rights under the Fourteenth Amendment were not addressed, not decided, and not even meaningfully mentioned.

But at the top of the case, before the decision itself, sat something called a “headnote” which said, in part: “The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

I read it again. Then again. My coffee grew cold on the table beside me.

The headnote claimed that under the Constitution corporations were persons.

The decision explicitly refused to rule on that question.

One of them was lying.

I paid seventy cents for photocopies and walked through the crisp winter air to the office of Jim Ritvo, a local attorney and friend.

“What’s a headnote?” I asked, spreading the pages on his desk.

He leaned back in his chair, studying the documents. “Court reporters write them. They’re summaries for lawyers, convenient shortcuts to understand what a case is about without reading the whole thing.” He looked up at me. “But Thom, headnotes aren’t law. They’re not part of the decision. They have no legal standing whatsoever.”

“So, this headnote that says corporations are persons . . . ​”

“Isn’t law,” he finished. “Never was.”

I felt the floor shift beneath me.

“But every case since 1886 cites this as precedent! Law schools teach it. The Supreme Court itself cited it more than a dozen times.”

Jim picked up the pages, reading more carefully. “Then somebody’s been fooled for a very long time. Or somebody’s been doing the fooling.”

The American Dream Is Murdered

I didn’t know it yet, standing in that Vermont library, but I was about to discover why my generation was the last to experience the American Dream as our parents and grandparents knew it.

When my Boomer generation was the same average age as Millennials are today, back in 1990, we held 21.3 percent of the nation’s wealth. Louise and I shared in that wealth: although we were still in our 30s, in 1990 we owned a profitable small business—our fourth—and a nice home.

Our own locally owned business, a home of our own, and the knowledge that our kids would have more opportunities than we did: that was, in fact, one common way of defining the American Dream. It was normal then.

My dad, born in 1928, worked in a tool and die shop. He was able to buy a house, a new car every two years, and take a two-week vacation every year because the middle class in America before the Reagan Revolution had a pretty damn good life. Dad retired in the 1990s with a full pension that let him and my mom travel the world. He lived the American Dream, as did his four boys.

Millennials today, by contrast, are roughly the same number of people as Boomers were in 1990 but hold only 4.6 percent of the nation’s wealth. If they’re the same age I was in 1990, they’re most likely struggling to own a home, are deeply in debt, and find it nearly impossible to start a small business.

This is what a bizarre theory called “corporate personhood” or “corporate constitutional rights” has brought us to. Boomers in their 30s owned 21.3 percent of the nation’s wealth, while Millennials in their 30s today own a mere 4.6 percent of the nation’s wealth.

And the story for Zoomers, those born in the late 1990s and early 2000s, is pretty much the same, if not slightly worse.

What happened?

The answer was there on page 394 of that musty law book. A single fraudulent sentence that gave America’s oligarchs and the corporations that made them rich the constitutional weapons to dismantle everything that made America work for working people.

Why did my children’s generation face stagnant wages while across the nation worker productivity soared? Why did crushing student debt replace the free or near-free college my generation enjoyed? Why did housing costs explode from two times annual income to ten times annual income? Why did healthcare go from a manageable expense to the leading cause of bankruptcy in America? Why did the promise that hard work would be rewarded with security become a cruel joke for tens of millions of Americans?

Virtually all of it came about because of corporate constitutional rights.

That fraudulent headnote gave corporations constitutional rights they could wield against democratic governance. Against unions. Against environmental protections. Against consumer safety laws. Against taxes that funded public goods. Against anything and everything that built and sustained the American middle class.

The American Dream didn’t just fade away: it was murdered. And the murder weapon was forged in 1886 and then lifted against all of us with the 1980s Reagan Revolution.

The Investigation Begins

I spent the next few weeks in that library, pulling case after case. The pattern was unmistakable. Dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of court decisions cited Santa Clara as establishing corporate constitutional rights. They cited it the same way, always referencing that headnote but never quoting the decision itself that contradicted it.

The legal profession had been fooled. Or perhaps more accurately, it had fooled itself, generation after generation of lawyers and judges accepting what they’d been taught without checking the original source.

But who wrote that headnote? And why? Is this what they intended? And what does it mean not just for working-class people but for our democracy itself?

The answer to those questions would lead me deep into one of the most consequential conspiracies in American history, a conspiracy involving railroad oligarchs who controlled more wealth than entire nations, a Supreme Court justice whose corruption was hiding in plain sight, and a court reporter whose single fraudulent sentence would reshape American democracy for more than a century.

This book tells that story. But it tells more than that.

It reveals how that original crime in 1886 metastasized into today’s corporate domination of our economy, our media, our politics, and our lives. How the oligarchs of this era—the billionaires who control corporations like Exxon-Mobil, Amazon, Goldman Sachs, Google, and Comcast—are the direct heirs to those railroad barons. How they’ve used the same legal fiction to accumulate unprecedented power and transfer over fifty trillion dollars from working Americans to their own money bins just over the past four decades.

It shows how two Progressive Eras, from the 1890s through 1921 and again from 1933 through 1981, built the American Dream by constraining corporate power. How the Founders understood the dangers of corporate tyranny and deliberately excluded corporations from constitutional protection. How FDR’s recognition that “necessitous men are not free men” led to the creation of the largest middle class in world history, with two-thirds of Americans achieving middle-class status by the day Reagan was sworn in as president on January 20, 1981.

And it shows how corporate constitutional rights gave America’s oligarchs, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump, the weapons they needed to tear it all down. To crush unions. To slash taxes on the wealthy. To offshore our factories. To turn healthcare into a profit center. To transform housing into a speculative commodity. To burden our children with crushing debt for the education that was once free or nearly free.

All to make themselves richer than any king, emperor, or pharaoh in all of human history.

The Cover-Up and the Solutions

But stealing our constitutional rights wasn’t enough; to get away with the crime, the perpetrators needed to hide it. They needed to make sure that when working Americans asked, “Who killed the American Dream?” they’d blame the wrong people.

Thus, they began a cover-up of the crime, in part, as an effort to slip it into subsequent Supreme Court decisions to make it law and, in part, as an effort to disguise the crime itself from current and future generations.

Over the past fifty or so years, the most effective part of the deflection—or cover-up playbook—has been a remarkably successful effort to divert Americans’ attention and anger away from the oligarchs and corporations that are actively undermining our democracy and get people to instead blame their woes on women, people of color, welfare recipients, and, most recently, nonwhite immigrants.

Entire media operations have joined this effort, as I’ll document in subsequent chapters. And it’s been largely successful; most Americans—and certainly the Republican base—have bought the cover-up hook, line, and sinker. They have no idea that the same billionaires who own the media that keeps them fooled are also working hard to keep them down, and instead cheer every effort to “own the libs” rather than constraining corporate or billionaire power.

What You Can Do to Fight Back

Most importantly, this book shows how we can undo the crime. How we can restore democracy. How we can reclaim the rights that were stolen from us and given to artificial entities that exist only on paper. I’ll detail for you exactly how we can rebuild the American Dream for our children and grandchildren.

There are multiple steps to reversing the abuse of human rights that this crime, committed in 1886, handed to corporations and America’s oligarchs.

They include passing legislation to blunt some of the worst impacts (particularly on our politics, now that corporations and billionaires can legally buy elections), passing a constitutional amendment to prevent Republicans on the Supreme Court from continuing or expanding these “corporate constitutional rights,” and waking up as many Americans as possible to this crime and its consequences.

We can fight back at every level of government (and you’ll learn that people have been doing just this for decades with increasing success). Taking on this battle can be one of the most effective ways of re--empowering our democracy.

The rebellion has already begun; by the time you finish this book, you’ll know how to join it.

But first, we need to understand exactly how the crime was committed.

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Obama rescues neoliberalism from itself

The following year Barack Obama was elected to the presidency. In his inaugural address he told the American people that markets needed supervision to work.

“Nor is the question before us whether the market is a force for good or ill,” President Obama said, looking into the camera. “Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched. But this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control. The nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous.”

Americans who were hopeful that the age of neoliberalism was coming to an end (even if they didn’t know there was a name for it) cheered: Obama’s popularity soared above 60 percent.

Instead of ending neoliberalism, though, Obama expanded it dramatically with the Affordable Care Act, putting the nation’s healthcare needs in the hands of billion-dollar insurance companies and extending the privatization of Medicare through the Medicare Advantage scam that George W. Bush had brought to being.

He refused to regulate the nation’s monopolies, instead extending George W. Bush’s Emergency Economic Stabilization Act and the Troubled Asset Relief Program that poured ever-more money into the pockets of Wall Street banksters.

Advised by notorious neoliberal Larry Summers (formerly Clinton’s Treasury Secretary) and former Wall Street banker Timothy Geitner (as Obama’s Treasury Secretary), Obama passed on the opportunity to re-regulate the banks or push for legislation like a revisited Glass-Steagal to prevent checkbook banks from gambling in the stock market with your and my deposits. Instead, he went with the watered-down Dodd-Frank legislation championed by two noted neoliberal legislators who were both deeply in the pockets of Wall Street banks.[cxiii]

Bankers are still running many of their old scams even as I write these words in 2022.

Meanwhile, President Obama oversaw without objection the explosion of the neoliberal dream of a so-called “gig economy” where companies relabeled their employees as “independent contractors” to avoid insurance, taxes and the regulations and liabilities that come as an employer.

Even his smallest pushbacks against neoliberalism – including an attempt to raise income taxes on the morbidly rich and advance universal pre-K – were shot down by Republicans and neoconservative Democrats in Congress.

Dissatisfied, Americans decided to try the Republicans again.

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George W Bush Pushes Neoliberalism even farther

By the time George W. Bush became president in January 2001 neoliberalism had defeated even the Perot faction of American thought: politicians who opposed it, like Bernie Sanders and Sherrod Brown on the left and Mike Lee and Ron Paul on the right, were dismissed as cranks and outliers trying to stand in the way of progress.

Bush continued the process, with his largest success being the privatization, with the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003, of a large chunk of the nation’s premiere government-funded healthcare program, Medicare.

The new “Medicare Advantage” programs, entirely run by private entities, cost the federal government on average 11% more than Medicare and were given the freedom to deny services to their customers the way health insurance companies have been scamming their customers for generations.[xcv]

I lay this out chapter-and-verse in The Hidden History of American Healthcare, but suffice it to say that by this writing nearly half of the entire Medicare program has now been replace by fully privatized health insurance under the deceptive rubric of “Medicare Advantage” while Medicare itself has been seriously defunded by the transfer of so many billions to the bottom lines of “Advantage” providers.

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Bush also used the excuse of the deregulation of the banking industry in 1999 to look the other way as his morbidly rich donors in the financial services industry created hundreds of exotic new “products” to sell to investors, the most notorious being Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) used to bundle fraudulent home mortgages in with good ones to disguise their provenance and risks.

Bankers like California’s notorious “Foreclosure King” Stephen Mnuchin became fabulously rich, picking up a private jet and multimillion-dollar mansion while the nation’s economy inched further and further out onto thin ice. [xcvi]

Through it all, despite a few warning voices, the Bush administration and the neoliberal-leaning governments of Europe’s largest nations all reassured us that the market operated on its own “magic invisible hand” rules and there was nothing to worry about. Just trust the market and the market-makers. They know what they’re doing.

And, indeed, they did know what they were doing. Just like John Dillinger and Ken Lay did. They extracted literally trillions of dollars out of the US and other western economies and then stood back, feigning helplessness, when it all collapsed in the “Bush Crash” of 2008.

In response to the crisis bankers created, governments around the world shoveled money at those very same bankers and their institutions.

“The total potential federal government support could reach up to $23.7 trillion,” is what Neil Barofsky, special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), reported to Congress in 2008.[xcvii]

While the actual American part of the banker bailout was probably closer to $5 trillion, by 2010 the bankers were giving each other billion-dollar bonuses and diving off the high boards into their money bins.

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It’s almost as if Milton Friedman had planned it; after all, his first step out of academia and into paid shilling for industry and the ultra-rich was to author that notorious 1946 pamphlet for the real estate industry advocating total deregulation of both the real estate business and the banks that offered mortgages.

Bush’s other big neoliberal experiment was with the government of Iraq. His brother Jeb Bush, along with his Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his Vice President Dick Cheney, and his advisors Paul Wolfowitz, Bill Kristol, and John Bolton had all signed onto the notorious 1998 Project for a New American Century statement calling on then-President Bill Clinton to immediately invade Iraq and expel Saddam Hussein.[xcviii]

As Cheney would later note, Iraq was sitting atop the second-largest single-country reserve of oil in the world, just behind Saudi Arabia. “He sits on top of 10 per cent of the world’s oil reserves,” Cheney said, adding, “He has enormous wealth being generated by that.”[xcix]

While former Haliburton oil company chief Cheney was salivating over the prospect of seizing and selling all that oil, George W. Bush saw a war in Iraq as a way to guarantee his own re-election in 2004.

Back in 1999, writer Mickey Herskowitz, hired by the Bush family to ghost-write Bush’s autobiography A Charge To Keep,[c] explained that Bush told him:

“One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it. If I have a chance to invade, if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.”[ci]

Bush wasn’t much of an ideologue and its unlikely he could have even explained neoliberalism, but his Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was both a student and close personal friend of Milton Friedman and an ardent neoliberal.

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Once Iraq was conquered and Hussein was dead, Rumsfeld put former Kissinger and Associates managing director L. Paul Bremmer III in charge of the country. Bremmer, the wealthy son of the former CEO of Christian Dior, had been educated in the world’s best private schools from Phillips Andover Academy to Yale University to the Paris Institute of Political Studies. He knew the rich and powerful of the world – he was one of them – and had been Rumsfeld’s assistant in the first Bush administration overseeing the first Gulf War against Saddam.

Bremmer followed the Mont Pelerin neoliberal script to the last detail. The Iraqi army was the nation’s largest employer, with over a half-million men drawing a weekly paycheck and each having an AK-47 handy in their homes. Bremmer fired them all, creating an instant and well-armed insurgency of pissed-off formerly middle-class soldiers.

He also shut down almost all of the hundreds of government-owned companies, from those manufacturing steel to machine tools to cement and military goods.

He threw open the country to the world’s predatory corporations, eliminating all tariffs and trade regulations, while standing aside as the nation’s government-run libraries and museums were looted on behalf of wealthy foreign antiquities collectors. All of this was a clear violation of international law that prevents winners in wars from looting the countries they’ve conquered, but neoliberals around the world had always ignored such laws.

Rumsfeld defended the video of looters carrying off 3000-year-old irreplaceable artifacts with the glib, “Freedom’s untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.” When asked if looting was the inevitable consequence of Rumsfeld’s “freedom,” he replied, as CNN reported, “Stuff happens.”[cii]

Bremmer then threw out Iraq’s progressive corporate and individual income taxes that peaked at 45% and replaced them with Milton Friedman’s beloved 15% flat-tax, a huge windfall to Iraq’s wealthy elite but a massive and sudden tax increase for the country’s low-income workers.

He ended Iraq’s laws requiring domestic ownership of major industries, allowing foreigners to buy and own 100% of pretty much anything – from land to oil to businesses – and take up to 100% of their profits out of the country tax-free.[ciii]

After neoliberalism had failed spectacularly in Chile, gutted the American and British middle classes, and had flipped Russia from a brief democracy into a brutal oligarchy, Iraq was to be the final proof that it could work.

Wolfowitz, Bremmer, and neoliberal apologists around the world promised the country would soon flower, as the “free market” lacking government regulation and with minimal taxation would solve all problems from poverty to political corruption to meeting the people’s basic food, housing and safety needs.

It didn’t work out that way.

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Instead of a million flowers blossoming in the soil of neoliberal “freedom,” over three million Iraqis lost their homes and became internal refugees,[civ] nearly a half-million fled the country (those with the wealth to get out), and 288,000 died as a direct consequence of the American invasion.[cv]

And that doesn’t begin to account for generations of trauma and PTSD, destroyed infrastructure and torn-apart families, and the shattering of America’s image and influence around the world.

Twenty years later and the neoliberal project largely abandoned and never mentioned out loud by its champions, Iraq is still staggering, plagued by political instability, disease, and an Iraqi warlord version of the oligarchic political culture neoliberalism always produces.

Neoliberalism blows up in Bush’s face

Meanwhile, back here in America, neoliberal policies brought our government and economic system to its knees in the last year of Bush’s presidency. Banks, investment houses and real estate speculators had been deregulated nine years earlier and used their new “freedom” to essentially rob, rape, and pillage the American financial landscape.

In the process, corrupt financial operations and betting on stocks became a huge part of the American economy.

The greatest damage to America came because loaning, borrowing, and trading money and securities produces absolutely nothing of lasting value to a country. It’s not at all like manufacturing, where applying labor to raw materials produces products that have lasting value.

Instead, unregulated finance extracts massive amounts of cash as commissions and fees for a small number of fabulously wealthy and powerful Wall Street giants, actually reducing resources that could instead be used to manufacture things that do add value for generations.

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But don’t just take my word for it. Jack Bogle was the guy who created the first widely-traded index fund, the Vanguard 500, back in 1976. Although he stepped down as chairman of the company in 1999, he still opines about the state of the economy and, in a moment of extraordinary candor, told reporters for Money magazine in 2015:

“The job of finance is to provide capital to companies. We do it to the tune of $250 billion a year in IPOs and secondary offerings. What else do we do? We encourage investors to trade about $32 trillion a year. So the way I calculate it, 99% of what we do in this industry is people trading with one another, with a gain only to the middleman. It’s a waste of resources.”[cvi]

In 2008 the bill came due for the trillions of dollars speculators, hedge funds, mortgage bankers and other predators in the financial services industry had extracted from the American and world economies.

It started in 2000, after the 1999 neoliberal deregulation of America’s banks: bankers went on a lending spree to would-be homeowners, offering them mortgages with no income or asset requirements (sometimes called “Liar Loans”).

Because this practice was injecting so much new money into the housing market, housing prices were soaring; many of the no-asset home purchasers were average people trying to be real estate speculators, figuring they’d buy a house, hold it for a year or two, and sell it for a solid profit.

“Home Flipping” became a thing.

All across America telephone poles had flyers on them for “real estate seminars” promising to teach average folks how to make money in the housing market just like the billionaire bankers did. It was a national celebration of get-rich-quick grifting.

One of the larger grifts in this marketplace, for example, was Trump University. As the Washington Post noted, Trump’s sales pitch was, “[T]he billionaire had made enough money for himself. Now, he would put his famous brain to work for the little guy.”[cvii]

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The Liar Loans not only let millions of people speculate in the real estate market but also gave an entrée into single-family housing for millions of people whose income and assets would have prevented them from borrowing in a regulated market. As long as the economy was good, though, and they had a reliable income, they could hang on to their first homes.

The banks and mortgage houses took those Liar Loan mortgages, mixed them with “good” assets like mortgages to people with the means to repay their loans, and sold these interest-bearing “products” in the open investment market.

They bribed the credit rating agencies to give them a seal of approval, and banks themselves bought and sold trillions in these “Collateralized Debt Obligations” or CDOs and other exotic “products.”[cviii]

Because they were generally high-interest loans (because of the borrowers’ poor credit ratings), they paid far more than most all other readily available investments. Throughout the first 8 years of the 21^st century they spread into investment portfolios all over the world.

Then came the recession of 2006. The market softened, unemployment went up, and millions were facing foreclosure. Most hung on, driving up credit card or other debt to keep their houses, hoping prices would rise back up enough that they could sell them for what they owed.

That wasn’t to happen.

By 2008, the housing market was completely in the tank and foreclosures had reached the point where the owners of CDOs and other “innovative” investment instruments created out of the 1999 deregulation could no longer ignore the risk of defaults.

January 2008 saw a 57 percent increase in foreclosures over the previous year, and February dropped another 24 percent year-over-year. Resale home prices fell 4.6 percent in January and were down 8.2 percent by the end of February. The system was hemorrhaging cash. [cix]

The biggest problem big investors in CDO’s and other debt instruments had was that, because the market was deregulated and supposedly run by the “invisible hand” of the marketplace, nobody knew exactly how many bad mortgages were buried in these bundles or what kind of a liability they represented as a share of the US’s $12 trillion mortgage market.[cx] Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae alone had taken on $3 trillion in loans all by themselves: the big banks were opaque and, if they knew how much poison they’d packaged, they weren’t telling anybody.[cxi]

Money market funds were heavily invested in these new “products” and tried to unload them as fast as they could…but nobody was buying. Seeing that the funds, which are not federally guaranteed, could fail, investors pulled out cash like there was no tomorrow.

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On September 16^th, the Reserve Primary Fund “broke the buck,” meaning they paid back dollars given them with less than a dollar each. The next day investors pulled a record $172 billion from money market funds, adding to the pressure (normal withdrawals are around $7 billion/day).[cxii]

By the time of the 2008 election, Congress had poured $700 billion into bailing out bankers and the Fed had anted up almost three trillion dollars, between their $1.7 trillion “commercial loan program,” their $540 billion loan to money markets, and their June “Term Auction Facility” loan of $225 billion. The FDIC threw an additional $1.3 trillion into the banking system on November 21^st.

Wall Street bankers (except for Lehman Brothers, the only bank “allowed to fail”) were sighing a huge sigh of relief and hurrying to stash their billions of ill-gotten gains in tax havens overseas.

At the same time, homeowners across America were being thrown out of their houses in a national tsunami of foreclosures that lead an early explosion in homelessness.

Bankster Steve Mnuchin alone would pick up one of the California banks holding some of this debt and throw 36,000 people out of their homes, each foreclosure earning his company a federal bailout payment and earning him the moniker “The Foreclosure King.” This positioned him perfectly for a later job with Donald Trump as the nation’s Treasury Secretary. His profitable, no-risk strategy was being replicated by banks and mortgage brokers all across the nation.

As fully 10 million Americans lost their homes, Americans began to openly question neoliberalism. On my radio program at the time, I openly speculated that 2008 would go down in history as “the year neoliberalism died in America.”

Sadly, I was premature in that proclamation.

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

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Bill Clinton hearts the neoliberal revolution

Texas billionaire Ross Perot jumped into the race to take on the two neoliberal “free traders” George HW Bush and Bill Clinton. If America signed NAFTA, Perot warned, there would be “a giant sucking sound from the south” pulling jobs out of America.

Worse, Perot warned, this would eventually become a national security issue: when we reached the point where we couldn’t make an aircraft carrier or missile without parts from China or another foreign country, our ability to defend ourselves would be severely compromised.

“If we keep shifting our manufacturing jobs across the border and around the world and deindustrializing our country,” Perot said, “we will not be able to defend this great country...”[lxxxvii] And today, as CBS News reports, we’re there: “The hellfire missile – launched from helicopters, jets and predator drones – has been a critical weapon in the war on terror. But the propellant that fires the missile must be imported from China.”[lxxxviii]

The 1992 election represented the first American revolt against neoliberalism: Perot took almost 20 percent of all votes. Bill Clinton was elected with only a 43 percent plurality of the vote.

Perot’s movement aside, by 1993 the Democratic Party had largely embraced a slightly-softer (still allowing for public schools and some social programs) form of neoliberalism.

The American and British groupthink consensus across major political parties was that Freidman and his Mont Pelerin buddies were right: the rich should rule the world, labor unions were a pain-in-the-ass, and government regulation simply stifled innovation.

Everything that could be privatized should be, and stockholder returns should be the only metric business used for decision-making, discarding “old” notions of corporate responsibility to workers, customers, communities and even the institution of the corporation itself. If increasing profits and thus dividends meant screwing workers, producing substandard products, demanding huge tax breaks from or polluting communities, or even breaking up and selling off the company, so be it. Even the Supreme Court was now onboard, having fully embraced Robert Bork’s notion that profits were the singular North Star.[lxxxix]

Reagan’s destruction of the union movement added a critical problem for the Democrats: unions had been their major funding source. Democratic consultant Al From came up with the idea of the Party embracing corporate America and neoliberal ideology to make up for the lost union money; he traveled to Arkansas to pitch it to Governor Bill Clinton, who agreed to run for president on that platform.

From later (2013) wrote a book about the experience and the need for the Party to run and govern on the basis of “economic centrism, national security, and entitlement reform…”[xc]

Democrats had now joined Republicans in the back pocket of American business, although to differentiate themselves they embraced “clean” industries like banking, insurance and tech, leaving money from the “dirty” industries like coal, oil and chemicals to the Republicans.

Clinton embraced with gusto the neoliberal idea that “free trade” was the ultimate way to end wars between nations. In December 1996 New York Times columnist (and billionaire) Thomas Friedman (no relation to Milton) laid out what came to be called The McDonald’s Doctrine, positing that no two nations who each had a McDonald’s would ever go to war.[xci] (In a more recent column, he revises the idea from the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention to the Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention.)

After all, when nations are economically interconnected, don’t they have an incentive to not bust up that relationship with something as gross as military conflict?

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The idea was an idiocy on its face then and still is today, but it flew. Books were published, articles written, speeches given. Free trade agreements flowed like champagne, while America continued to hemorrhage good paying manufacturing jobs and slid towards becoming a “Do you want fries with that?” service economy.

Clinton also took a meataxe to the nation’s welfare programs, apparently convinced of the conservative message that even survival-level benefits caused laziness -- or he’d decided that buying into that myth was politically useful.

If that premise were true, by the way, it would be a great selling point for taxing all inheritances at 100%. After all, who would want to inflict laziness on their children by leaving them enough money that they don’t need to work?

But, of course, it was just another idiocy promoted by the very rich (who will pass along their wealth to their children without worrying it’ll cause laziness) to justify cutting tax-funded programs for “lower class” folks, particularly people of color, so they can keep their tax dollars in their money bins.

Nonetheless, Clinton proudly declared in a State of the Union speech that he had brought about “the end of welfare as we know it.”

Meanwhile, the Soviet Union had undergone a controlled demolition, guided by the hand of Mikael Gorbachev, who genuinely hoped to turn his nation from a corrupt communist oligarchy into a democratic-socialist success story along the lines of the Scandinavian countries.

Gorby explicitly hoped for Russia to emulate Sweden and become a “socialist beacon for the world,” as described by Marshall Pomer and Lawrence Klein in their book The New Russia: Transition Gone Awry.[xcii]

In December 2015, Louise and I attended a banquet in Moscow with former President Gorbachev, President Putin and a few dozen others. Gorbachev, who had spent hours with my friend and colleague Leila Connors (we made several environmental documentaries together, along with Leonardo DiCaprio) for her movie The Arrow of Time, still hoped for the best.

“Many of these ideas might appear Utopian or unachievable in the context of the present political order,” he’d told Leila a few years earlier when the movie premiered in Switzerland, “and that is precisely because they address the roots of the current issues.”

Nonetheless, when I saw him he looked like a broken man. His project to create a Scandinavian-style democracy had been hijacked by Bill Clinton and other leaders of the G7 countries at a meeting of that group in 1991 when they explicitly told him he must embrace neoliberalism if he wanted western loans to help with his transition project.

Help to keep up the fight!

“Their suggestions as to the tempo and methods of transition,” Gorbachev is quoted in The New Russia, “were astonishing.”

Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine quotes the Russian newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta, noting at that time that “for the first time Russia will get in its government a team of [neo]liberals who consider themselves followers of Friedrich von Hayek and the ‘Chicago school’ of Milton Friedman.”

After a single year of Friedman’s “reforms,” Klein chronicles the outcome:

“[M]illions of middle-class Russians had lost their life savings when money lost its value, and abrupt cuts to subsidies meant millions of workers had not been paid in months. The average Russian consumed 40 percent less in 1992 than 1991, and a third of the population fell below the poverty line. The middle class was forced to sell personal belongings from card tables on the streets – desperate acts that the Chicago School economists praised as ‘entrepreneurial,’ proof that a capitalist renaissance was indeed under way, one family heirloom and second-hand blazer at a time.”

The country was gutted like a fish, its assets sold off for pennies on the dollar to the men who we now know as “Russian oligarchs,” fabulously rich billionaires who float above the Russian landscape the way Jeff Bezos blasts himself into outer space over America.

In December, 1994 I was working with the German-based international relief organization Salem International and visited their newest project in Kaliningrad, Russia. It brought me face-to-face with the destruction of the Chicago Boys’ neoliberal reforms: vodka was cheaper than potable water, organized crime ran most of the commerce in the city, and the families I visited kept baskets filled with scraps of newspaper next to their toilets to use as toilet paper.

This city, where Immanuel Kant once lived, had disintegrated after its parts had been stripped, monetized and sold off to the highest bidder. Here’s an excerpt from the diary I kept of that trip:

“I landed at about noon on a gray, blustery, raw-cold day in Kaliningrad. ... A once-beautiful old river, now black and fouled with sewage and industrial waste, runs through the city...

Herr Burkhardt took me for an afternoon walk. A cold wind cut through the stone streets, and most of the buildings looked like a typical 19th century (or earlier) European city, although there was no color anywhere. No paint, no signs, no colorful curtains. Everything was gray, from the leaden sky to the grime-covered buildings to the slushy sidewalks and cobblestone streets.

We crossed the river on a long bridge, and walked a few blocks into town, navigating around gaping 2-foot-diameter open manholes in the middle of the sidewalks, opening down into black pools of sewage ten feet below the surface.

The streets were filled with people, bundled against the wind, their faces lined and cracked by weather and hard lives in this dismal place. I saw not a single smile: everybody seemed in a hurry to get somewhere, and few people talked among themselves. ...

Back at Olga’s house, the TV was on in the living room. ...When the show ended, a man’s face filled the screen. He was giving some sort of speech, and his face was twisted with an insane anger. He pounded his fist and shook his finger at the camera, then became soft and soothing in his voice, then began shouting again. He was followed by what was obviously a news anchorwoman, sitting behind a desk, making commentary.

“What’s that?” I said to the room in general.

“Vladimir Zhirinovsky [the extreme right-wing candidate],” said Olga in German. “He’s a candidate in tomorrow’s election, and he said that if he’s elected then we should work more closely with Germany, reestablish our old border with them.”

“Isn’t Poland in between you and Germany?”

“That’s what he means,” Olga said, shaking her head in disbelief. “Get rid of Poland.”

I shivered. ...

Boris Yeltsin won the election and continued his neoliberal reforms with the help of the Chicago Boys, paving the way for President Putin’s rise to power in 2000, finally killing altogether Gorbachev’s Scandinavian hopes. Russia is truly the clearest example of the consequences of full-blown neoliberalism, and Zhirinovsky was their version of Donald Trump, who himself rose to power in America as a backlash against 40 years of somewhat slower and softer neoliberalism here.

Back in America, the zeitgeist of the era was personified by the hot new thing for Democrats to do in the Clinton 90s: make an annual pilgrimage to the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland to rub elbows with the world’s bankers and billionaires. Philanthropy could take care of people’s needs, the neoliberal billionaires asserted, and in his 1996 State of the Union speech Clinton declared, “The era of big government is over.”[xciii]

Taking that theory to its logical next step, in 1999 Clinton signed the Financial Services Modernization Act (FSMA) that unraveled banking regulations dating back to FDR’s Glass-Steagall law that had outlawed the dangerous 1920s practice of banks gambling in the stock or other markets with depositors’ money.[xciv]

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Neoliberalism comes to America

In America it was inflation that opened the door to Milton Friedman’s neoliberalism.

Inflation is usually caused by one of two things: international devaluation or internal dilution of a country’s currency, or widespread shortages of essential commodities that drive up prices enough to echo through the entire economy.

The early 1970s got both, one deliberately and the other as the result of war.

Between 1971 and 1973, President Nixon pulled the US out of the Bretton Woods economic framework that had been put together after World War II to stabilize the world’s currencies and balance trade. The dollar had been pegged to gold at $35 an ounce, and the world’s other currencies were effectively pegged to the dollar.

But the United States couldn’t buy enough gold to support the number of dollars we needed as our economy grew, so on August 15, 1971 Nixon announced to the nation and the world that he was taking the dollar off the gold standard and putting a ten percent tariff on most imports of finished goods into the US to deal with the changes in the dollar’s value relative to other currencies.

The immediate result was the value of the dollar rose as the world breathed a sigh of relief that the “gold crisis” was coming to an end and the dollar would become more portable. But an increased value in the dollar relative to other currencies meant that products manufactured in the US became more expensive overseas, hurting our exports.

At that at that time there were 60,000 more factories in the US than today and Wal-Mart was advertising that everything in their stores was “Made in the USA”[lxix]: exports were an important part of our economy and imports were mostly raw materials or “exotic” goods not produced here like sandalwood from Thailand or French wines.[lxx]

To deal with the “strong dollar” problem, Nixon announced in December, 1971 that the US was devaluing our currency relative to the Japanese Yen, German Mark and British Pound (among others) by 11 percent. It was the first-ever negotiated realignment of the world’s major currencies, and Nixon crowed it was “the greatest monetary agreement in the history of the world.”

But we were still importing more and more goods from overseas, particularly cars from Japan, increasing our trade deficit and hurting American jobs that manufactured goods like cars that competed with the Japanese and the Germans. So in the second week of February, 1973 Nixon did it again, negotiating a further devaluation of the dollar by 10 percent.[lxxi]

While devaluing the dollar against other currencies didn’t have much immediate impact on products grown or made in the US from US raw materials, it did mean that the prices of imports (including oil, which was the primary energy supply for pretty much everything in America) went up.

Over the next decade, the impact of that devaluation would work its way through the American economy in the form of a mild inflation, which Nixon thought could be easily controlled by Fed monetary policy.

What he hadn’t figured on, though, was the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. Because America took Israel’s side in the war, the Arab states cut off their supply of oil to the US in October 1973. As the State Department’s history of the time notes, “The price of oil per barrel first doubled, then quadrupled, imposing skyrocketing costs on consumers and structural challenges to the stability of whole national economies.”[lxxii]

Everything in America depended on oil, from manufacturing fertilizer to powering tractors, from lighting up cities to moving cars and trucks down the highway, from heating homes to powering factories. As a result, the price of everything went up: it was a classic supply-shock-driven inflation.

The war ended on January 19, 1974 and the Arab nations lifted their embargo on US oil in March of that year.[lxxiii] Between two devaluations and the explosion in oil prices, inflation in the US was running red-hot by the mid-1970s and it would take about a decade for it to be wrung out of our economy through Fed actions and normal readjustments in the international and domestic marketplace.

But Americans were furious. The price of pretty much everything was up by 10 percent or more, and wages weren’t keeping pace. Strikes started to roil the economy as Nixon was busted for accepting bribes and authorizing a break-in at the DNC’s headquarters in the Watergate complex. Nixon left office and Jerry Ford became our president, launching his campaign to stabilize the dollar with a nationally televised speech on October 8, 1974.[lxxiv]

Ford’s program included a 5 percent increase in top-end income taxes, cuts to federal spending, and “the creation of a voluntary inflation-fighting organization, named ‘Whip Inflation Now’ (WIN).”[lxxv] The inflation rate in 1974 peaked at 12.3 percent and home mortgage rates were going through the roof.

WIN became a joke, inflation persisted and got worse as we got locked into a wage-price spiral (particularly after Nixon’s wage-price controls ended), and President Ford was replaced by President Jimmy Carter in the election of 1976.

But inflation persisted as the realignment of the US dollar and the price of oil was forcing a market response to the value of the dollar. (An “x” percent annual inflation rate means, practically speaking, that the dollar has lost “x” percent of its value that year.)

The inflation rates for 1977, 1978, 1979 and 1980 were, respectively, 6.7%, 9.0%, 13.3% and 12.5%.[lxxvi]

In 1978, Margaret Thatcher came to power in the United Kingdom and, advised by neoliberals at the UK-based private think tank the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), began a massive program of crushing that country’s labor unions while privatizing as much of the country’s infrastructure as she could, up to and including British Airways and British Rail.

She appointed Geoffrey Howe, a member of the Mont Pelerin Society and friend of Milton Friedman, as her Chancellor of the Exchequer (like the American Secretary of the Treasury) to run the British economy. Friedman, crowing about his own influence on Howe and the IEA’s founder Sir Antony Fisher wrote, “the U-turn in British policy executed by Margaret Thatcher owes more to him (i.e., Fisher) than any other individual.”[lxxvii]

The ideas of neoliberalism had, by this time, spread across the world and Thatcher was getting international applause for being the world’s first major economy to put them into place. Pressure built on President Carter to do the same, and, hoping it might help whip inflation, he deregulated the US trucking and airline industries, among others, in the last two years of his presidency.

Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 and when he came into office he jumped into neoliberal policy with both feet, starting by crushing the air traffic controllers’ union, PATCO, in a single week. Union busting, welfare-cutting, “free trade,” and deregulation were the themes of Reagan’s eight years, then carried on another four years by President George HW Bush, whose administration negotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

America was now officially on the neoliberal path, and Friedman and his Mont Pelerin buddies were cheering it on.

By 1982 inflation was down from 1981’s 8.9% to a respectable and tolerable 3.8%; it averaged around that for the rest of the decade. Instead of pointing out that it normally takes a supply-shock inflation and a currency-devaluation inflation a decade or two to work itself out, the American media gave Reagan and neoliberalism all the credit.[lxxviii] Milton Friedman, after all, had made his reputation as the great scholar of inflation and was a relentless self-promoter, appearing in newspapers and news magazines almost every week in one way or another.

Claiming neoliberal policies had crushed over a decade of inflation in a single year, and ignoring that it was just the normal wringing-out of inflation from the economy, Reagan openly embraced neoliberalism with a passion at every level of his administration.

Reagan embarked on a series of massive tax cuts for the morbidly rich, dropping the top tax bracket from 74 percent when he came into office down to 25 percent. He borrowed the money to pay for it, tripling the national debt from roughly $800 billion in 1980 to $2.4 trillion when he left office, and the effect of that $2 trillion he put on the nation’s credit card was a sharp economic stimulus for which Reagan took the credit.

He deregulated financial markets and Savings & Loan (S&L) banks, letting Wall Street raiders walk away with billions while gutting S&Ls so badly that the federal government had to bail out the industry by replacing about $100 billion the bankers had stolen.[lxxix]

“Greed is good!” was the new slogan, junk bonds became a thing, and Mergers and Acquisitions experts or “M&A Artists” who called themselves “Masters of the Universe” became the nation’s heroes, lionized in movies like Michael Douglas’ 1987 Wall Street.

Reagan signed Executive Order 12291 which required all federal agencies to use a cost-benefit estimate when putting together federal rules and regulations. Instead of considering externalities costs (things like the damage pollution does to people or how bank rip-offs hurt the middle class), however, the only “costs” his administration worried about were expenses to industry.

He cut the regulatory power of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and his head of that organization, Anne Gorsuch (mother of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch) was, as Newsweek noted, “involved in a nasty scandal involving political manipulation, fund mismanagement, perjury and destruction of subpoenaed documents…” leaving office in disgrace.[lxxx]

Meanwhile, Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, went on a binge selling off federal lands to drilling and mining interests for pennies on the dollar. When asked if he was concerned about the environmental destruction of sensitive lands, he replied, “[M]y responsibility is to follow the Scriptures which call upon us to occupy the land until Jesus returns.”[lxxxi] According to Watt’s fundamentalist dogma, any damage to the environment would be reversed when Jesus came back to Earth and “makes all things new.”

Reagan cut education funding, putting Bill Bennett in as Secretary of Education. Bennett was a big advocate of the so-called “school choice” movement that emerged in the wake of the 1954 Supreme Court Brown v Board decision that ordered school desegregation. All-white private, religious, and charter schools started getting federal dollars, public schools had their funds cut, and Bennett later rationalized it all by saying, “If it were your sole purpose to reduce crime, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.”[lxxxii]

The Labor Department had been created back in 1913 by progressive Republican President Taft,[lxxxiii] and Reagan installed former construction executive Ray Donovan as its head, the first anti-labor partisan to ever run the Department, a position he had to leave when he was indicted for fraud and grand larceny (the charges didn’t stick) related to Mafia associates he was in tight with. As the Washington Post noted when Donovan died:

“Carrying out Reagan’s conservative agenda, Mr. Donovan eased regulations for business, including Occupational Safety and Health Administration rules disliked by industry. He withdrew a rule requiring the labeling of hazardous chemicals in the workplace and postponed federal employment and training programs, equal opportunity employment measures, and a minimum-wage increase for service workers. His tenure also saw drastic cuts in the department’s budget and staff.”[lxxxiv]

That sort of thing happened in every federal agency throughout the Reagan and Bush presidencies; much of their neoliberal damage has yet to be undone.

Thus, by 1992 Americans were starting to wise up to Reagan’s scam.

Thousands of factories had closed, their production shipped overseas; working-class wages had stagnated since his first year in office while CEO salaries exploded from 29 times the average worker’s salary in 1978 to 129 times average worker wages in 1995 (they’re over 300 times worker wages today);[lxxxv] and union membership had dropped from a third of workers to around 15 percent (it’s around 6% of the private workforce today).[lxxxvi]

The Reagan/Bush administrations negotiated the neoliberal centerpiece NAFTA treaty (although they called it a “trade agreement” rather than a treaty because it couldn’t get past the constitutional requirement for a 2/3rds vote in the senate to approve all treaties) and wanted it signed the following year, in 1993.

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Nationwide Neoliberalism Experiments

The neoliberal ideology of Mises, Hayek and Freidman (et al) has now heavily influenced much of the developed and developing world, creating economic, political, and social disasters from Thailand to South Africa to El Salvador. But its biggest openly-declared national-scale experiments were kicked off in 1973 in Chile, 1981 in the United States, and 1991 in Russia.

In each case, rejecting a democratic government “of, by and for the people” and replacing it with a corporatist government “of, by and for the corporate and wealthy” has produced widespread disaster.

There is literally not one single example of any country in the world that put into place neoliberal policies that hasn’t turned into a violent police state (Chile), devasted its own working class while producing a bumper crop of billionaires (the United States and the United Kingdom), or both (Russia).

Milton Friedman Hearts General Pinochet

One of the most famous examples of neoliberal shock to a nation’s system came in Chile half a century ago.

In 1971, Chile accounted for 20 percent of the world’s known copper reserves; copper was then the world’s most valuable commercial metal (iron was #2) and represented fully three-quarters of that nation’s export earnings.[liv] [lv] And those earnings represented only a small portion of the actual value of the copper Chile exported because three massive American companies, Anaconda, Kennecott, and Cerro (referred to by Chileans as the Gran Minería) claimed to own roughly 80 percent of all that nation’s copper, remnants of 19^th century US claims to the mines.

The Chilean people had long chafed under this foreign ownership and exploitation of the nation’s single largest asset, as well as the way these foreign companies treated Chilean workers and miners.

Under President Frei Montalva through the 1960s the country negotiated a gradual and partial purchase of about half of the mines from the companies, but there was still widespread popular discontent around the issue.[lvi] Imagine how Texans might feel, for example, if 80 percent of all the oil and natural gas in that state was owned by Mexican companies and shipped to Mexico without any reimbursement other than paying taxes to the state of Texas.

As a result, Salvador Allende Gossen was elected president in 1970, after campaigning on fully nationalizing what copper was left in the mines (20% of the world’s reserves). The legislation to do this was presented to the country’s parliament in 1971 and overwhelmingly passed, with even the far-right National Party throwing in all their votes.

A Marxist, Allende had already nationalized the country’s banks by simply purchasing all the bank’s stock on the open market at competitive prices. Over 3 years he nationalized a total of 91 industries, increasing wages and lifting substantial portions of the working poor out of poverty.

On October 28^th 1971 Allende opened a special tribunal in Santiago to determine how much Chile should reimburse the Gran Minería companies. After public hearings, they determined that the companies had done so much damage to both the mines and Chile’s working people and economy that they should pay Chile for some of the copper they’d recently taken out of the country: Kennecott owed Chile, they said, $310 million; Anaconda owed them $78 million; and Cerro, which had been less exploitative of Chilean workers and resources, would receive $18 million from the Chilean state.[lvii]

This set off fireworks in Richard Nixon’s White House, with Henry Kissinger and Nixon’s CIA beside themselves. Nationalization of a country’s natural resources was, they believed, the first step down the road toward total communism, even though Socialist Allende was a pragmatic politician with no intention of disrupting most of the rest of his country’s industries. Capitalism was generally fine with Allende, so long as was Chilean-owned, paid workers well and acted responsibly in the nation’s interest.

But the pressure was on from the copper giants and, when Allende also took the nation’s telecommunications system away from American-owned International Telephone & Telegraph (ITT), which owned 70 percent of the system, Nixon decided to act.

As The New York Times reported in July of 1973:

“The International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation submitted to the White House last October an 18‐point plan designed to assure that the Government of Chile’s Marxist president, Salvador Allende Gossen, ‘does not get through the crucial next six months.’ …

“The I.T.T. plan called for extensive economic warfare against Chile to be directed by a special White House task force, assisted by the Central Intelligence Agency; the subversion of the Chilean armed forces; consultations with foreign governments on ways to put pressure on the Allende regime, and diplomatic sabotage.”[lviii]

Nixon authorized $10 million for a covert operation in Chile, specifying that the US Embassy in Santiago was to know nothing about it.[lix]

Allende was tremendously popular in Chile. While Richard Nixon had been elected president in 1972 with the votes of only 35 percent of eligible American voters, Allende’s party had won 37 percent of the 1970 popular vote. He was then elected president by an overwhelming majority in the Parliament, and 800,000 people – one tenth of the entire population of Chile – showed up in Santiago for a huge celebration.

Nixon, Kissinger, and the CIA decided to take action, and launched a campaign against Allende that included economic pressure and an alignment with the Chilean military through a general who’d led the so-called Nazi Cell within the Chilean army, firing on and killing striking workers in 1967. General Pinochet had “been several times to the U.S. Southern Command schools in the Panama Canal Zone and has served as military attaché in Washington,” having famously said, “The army’s duty is to kill.” [lx]

On September 11^th 1973 – a 9/11 that Chileans claim as their own – General Augusto Pinochet rolled his tanks and led his soldiers into Santiago while the army and air force bombed the presidential palace. The attack was preceded by hundreds of truckers (some funded and guided by IT&T and the CIA) blocking parts of the city for weeks, shutting down commerce to protest the leftwing tilt of the Allende government.[lxi]

President Allende gave a final address to the nation via radio, then, seeing where things were heading, shot himself in the head.

The violent coup was a shock to Chile. The country had one of the most advanced democracies on the continent, having 160 years of elected governments, the most recent run of democracy in the country lasting 41 years until Pinochet and the CIA took it down.

But Pinochet and the CIA had done their homework; the entire Chilean military went along with the coup. They then proceeded to round up the opposition, arresting and imprisoning over 13,000 people who were seen as allies and supporters of the Allende government. Thousands were taken to the National Stadium, where many were tortured and hundreds were executed. As Rupert Cornwall noted in The Independent, those numbers didn’t even include the “200,000 people who were forced into exile to escape persecution or worse.”[lxii]

By way of intimidating any Chileans who may think about joining opposition to Pinochet’s government, the military routinely left mutilated bodies on roadsides and in the country’s drainage and irrigation canals.

As The New York Times noted when Pinochet died:

“[D]uring his rule, more than 3,200 people were executed or disappeared, and scores of thousands more were detained and tortured or exiled. …

“The press was censored, and labor strikes and unions were banned. A fearsome security apparatus known as the National Intelligence Directorate, or DINA, persecuted, tortured and killed Pinochet opponents within Chile and sometimes beyond its borders. A government-commissioned report issued in 2004 concluded that almost 28,000 people had been tortured during the general’s rule. …

“Tens of thousands of Allende sympathizers were rounded up and brutally interrogated. A majority of the killings took place in the first three months, long after resistance had ended. In most cases, prisoners from a slum or agrarian community would be executed as a means of terrorizing their neighbors into accepting military rule. The killings were often cynically, and falsely, justified as cases in which prisoners were shot while trying to escape. ”[lxiii]

The blank slate of a new Chile offered the perfect laboratory for Milton Friedman’s “Chicago Boys” to try out their exciting new neoliberal experiment. With encouragement from Nixon’s administration, Pinochet brough in a group of economists who’d studied under Friedman and his acolytes, including Chilean economist Sergio de Castro.

They privatized most of the industries Allende had nationalized, threw open the nation’s retail systems to foreign-made products, abandoned wage and price regulations and labor protections, and increased military spending while cutting overall government spending by 10 percent. Pinochet even privatized the nation’s social security system, turning it over to the newly-privatized banks.

The result was an official 375 percent rate of inflation in 1974 (the highest in the world at that time) as cheap imports flooded the country, factories shut down, and workers and families were thrown onto the streets. Food and other necessities were estimated to have gone up as much as 1000 percent in price as malnutrition and hunger haunted the nation’s children.[lxiv]

The Chicago Boys were in a crisis as their experiment seemed to be collapsing all around them, so they convinced Pinochet to bring Milton Friedman himself to Chile to encourage people to continue with the Grand Experiment.

In Friedman’s memoir co-authored with his wife, Two Lucky People, he describes what he laid out to the Chilean people during his March, 1975 visit. “If this shock approach were adopted,” he wrote, “I believe it should be announced publicly in great detail, to take effect at a very close date.”

Pinochet’s 10 percent cut in government spending was way too timid, Friedman thought. Instead, he wrote, it should include:

“A commitment by the government to reduce government spending by 25 percent within six months, the reduction to take the form of across-the-board reduction of every separate budget by 25 percent, the personnel separations [firings of government employees] to take place as soon as possible…”

This gutting of the Chilean government wouldn’t really have much impact on the average person, Friedman said. “The discharge of present government employees will not reduce output but simply eliminate waste – their discharge will not mean the production of one fewer pair of shoes or one fewer loaf of bread.”

Betraying a certain self-consciousness, he added, “[S]ome of the poorest classes will be affected and whether they are or not, the program will be blamed for their distress.”

Summarizing his message to Pinochet and the Chilean people, Friedman notes, “Such a shock program could end inflation in months and would set the stage for the solution of your second major problem – promoting an effective social market economy.”

The problems with Chile’s economy two years into the Chicago Boy’s and Pinochet’s grand experiment were not at all the fault of Friedman’s neoliberal prescription, he wrote.

“This problem is not of recent origin. It arises from trends toward socialism that started 40 years ago and reached their logical – and terrible – climax in the Allende regime. You have been extremely wise in adopting the many measures you have already taken to reverse this trend.”

Pinochet took it to heart and by 1980 public spending under Pinochet was half what it had been when he seized power. But the economy was still in crisis.

“Undeterred,” Naomi Klein writes in Shock Doctrine, “Pinochet’s economic team went into more experimental territory, introducing Friedman’s most vanguard policies: the public school system was replaced by vouchers and charter schools, health care became pay-as-you-go, and kindergartens and cemeteries were privatized. Most radical of all, they privatized Chile’s social security system.”

Ironically, Klein notes, “The only thing that protected Chile from complete economic collapse in the early eighties was that Pinochet had never privatized Codelco, the state copper mine company nationalized by Allende. That one company generated 85 percent of Chile’s export revenues, which meant that when the financial bubble burst, the state sill had a steady source of funds.”[lxv]

In the end it had all been a futile exercise, as The New York Times noted in Pinochet’s obituary noted in December, 2006:

“But by the time of his death, even some of those economic victories had been called into question. The privatizing of Chile’s social security system, in particular, has come under attack as unjust and is undergoing revision. And across Latin America, many of the countries that had adopted similar reforms are reversing some of them, responding to a growing wave of popular, leftist anger over untrammeled foreign competition and unequal distribution of wealth.”[lxvi]

The neoliberals still largely control Chile, although they’ve become more like Bill Clinton than Augusto Pinochet. But the results are visible. Chile has Latin America’s top GDP per capita but that income and wealth is hardly well distributed; its poverty level is even higher than that of Brazil.

As economic scholar Branko Milanovic note in November 2019, “The bottom 5 percent of Chile’s population have an income level that is about the same as that of the bottom 5 percent in Mongolia. The top 2 percent enjoy an income level equivalent to that of the top 2 percent in Germany. … Chile is the country where billionaires’ share, in terms of GDP, is the highest in the world…The wealth of Chile’s billionaires, compared to their country’s GDP, exceeds even that of Russia’s.”[lxvii]

In his book The Pinochet File, Peter Kornbluh writes:

“The military regime’s problems began in mid-1982 when the country suffered its worst economic recession since the Great Depression. Gross national product plummeted by 14 percent; unemployment rose to 30 percent. Chile’s foreign debt reached $19 billion, then the highest per-capita debt in the world. The ‘economic miracle’ created by the University of Chicago-trained students of free market guru and regime advisor Milton Friedman was discredited.”[lxviii]

Although neoliberal “scholars” and think-tanks funded by American rightwing billionaires have gone to astonishing lengths to try to portray Friedman and Pinochet’s experiment with neoliberalism a success (just check the internet: there are 20 praising them for every one criticizing them), the simple reality is that the Chilean experiment, the world’s first real try at neoliberalism, failed utterly…and killed a lot of people in the process.

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Note: Yesterday, I accidentally sent out today’s book excerpt, so today I’m sharing with you a post that I posted on my non-politics site, WisdomSchool.com. I hope you find it useful/interesting. —Thom

My father died in stages, the way most people do, and the four of us boys — me and my three brothers, our wives beside us — didn’t know what we were watching.

He’d had a stroke and couldn’t speak or meaningfully move for the week or so before he died; we didn’t know what he was feeling. We didn’t know what to say, or whether to say anything at all, whether to hold his hand or give him space, whether the grimace on his face was pain or something we were misreading entirely.

We didn’t know why he’d suddenly seemed so alert for a day, and we didn’t know what it meant when that passed. We were well-educated, reasonably worldly adults with decades of life experience between us, and we stood around that bed like children who’d wandered into a room where the grownups were speaking a language none of us had ever been taught.

I’ve thought about that a lot over the years. Not with guilt, exactly, though some of that is in there too. Mostly I’ve thought about it as a kind of cultural failure; a thing our society stopped teaching somewhere along the way and never bothered to replace.

For most of human history, people died at home, surrounded by family and neighbors who’d seen it before, who knew the signs, who understood the arc of it. Death was something a community witnessed together and held together.

Then we moved it into hospitals, handed it over to professionals, and quietly lost the knowledge that ordinary people once carried as a matter of course. Now we’re shocked, disoriented, and grief-stricken in ways that might be at least partly unnecessary, if only someone had thought to tell us what was coming and what it meant.

That’s why a piece published this month in the Washington Post was so meaningful to me. Written by Ashley Abramson, it’s about death doulas, a profession that barely existed twenty years ago and is now growing fast enough that the International End-of-Life Doula Association has trained nearly 6,500 doulas worldwide.

A death doula is a non-medical companion who provides emotional, spiritual, and practical support to people who are dying, and to the families around them. As Kristen Patterson, a death doula and end-of-life planner in Northern Virginia, puts it, a death doula is “a calm, compassionate presence who can be there for dying people and their loved ones in their final moments.”

They can read aloud, play music, advocate with medical providers, help navigate paperwork and final arrangements, and simply stay present in ways that hospice nurses — stretched thin and focused on clinical care — often can’t. People don’t always realize that hospice care isn’t 24/7, Patterson notes; it certainly wasn’t in our case (Dad died at home). A death doula can be there as much as the family needs.

But what I found most valuable in Abramson’s piece wasn’t the description of the role itself. It was the specific things that death doulas, from their long experience at bedsides, have learned about the dying process that most families simply don’t know going in. This is the kind of knowledge that can transform a terrifying experience into something that still holds space for love and even peace.

The first thing the doulas want you to know is that dying can be peaceful. Diane Button, a death doula in Northern California and the author of What Matters Most: Lessons the Dying Teach Us About Living, puts it simply: “Just like the body knows how to be born, it knows how to die.”

For people who’ve been living for months or years in bodies racked by illness, the transition can actually come as a relief. Jill Schock, founder of Death Doula LA, told the Post that many people are relaxed at the end, because dying feels better than continuing to live in a body that’s been suffering.

That’s not what most of us picture when we imagine death, but it’s what people who sit with the dying actually see. And Button adds that the most common regrets she witnesses aren’t about things left undone — vacations not taken, money not earned — but about things left unsaid. If you can get to a place of peace with your relationships before that time comes, the dying itself tends to go more gently.

The second thing the doulas want you to understand is that the dying person can still participate in shaping that experience. Even in a hospital room, you can fill the space with what matters: favorite music, beloved objects, the people and even the pets you love.

Erica Reid Gerdes, founder of Waxwing Journeys in Chicago, describes a client whose husband found real comfort in being able to play music from his wife’s favorite musical and read her favorite books to her in those final days. She was unresponsive by then, but as Reid Gerdes says, “We knew she could still hear.” That’s not a small thing. That’s everything.

Third: death doesn’t need to be painful. Many of us carry images of painful deaths we witnessed in earlier generations, but modern hospice care is specifically designed to manage symptoms including pain.

Part of a doula’s job is to make sure the dying person has adequate medication and isn’t suffering unnecessarily. And medication does something else, too — it can calm what’s called terminal agitation, something my family saw with Dad and had absolutely no framework for understanding.

When someone is actively dying, the shutting down of organs can affect brain function in ways that cause the person to pick at their clothing, claw at their bedsheets, or seem frightened and restless.

Seeing that in someone you love is alarming, even traumatic, if nobody has told you it’s a known and manageable part of the process. It has a name. It can be treated. You’re not watching your father suffer some unique and inexplicable torment: you’re watching something that happens, that doulas and hospice nurses have seen many times, and that medication can ease.

Fourth, and this one is critically important: it’s normal, even expected, for a dying person to stop eating and drinking near the end. The body simply needs less energy. Swallowing becomes too taxing. The Post article makes the point explicitly — you don’t need to urge someone who’s actively dying to eat or drink. It doesn’t deprive them the way it would deprive a healthy person.

Families often feel guilty about this, or frightened by it, and push food and water when the body is trying to do what it knows to do. A doula can gently explain that letting go of that particular effort is itself an act of love.

And fifth — this is the one I keep returning to when I think about those last days with my father — there’s a phenomenon called terminal lucidity, or an end-of-life rally. In the days just before death, many dying people experience a sudden surge of energy and clarity. After days of not talking much or eating, they perk up. They seem like themselves again.

Families often mistake this for improvement, for a turn in the right direction, and the hope it kindles makes what follows all the more devastating. What doulas know, from having witnessed it over and over, is that this rally is often the body’s final gathering before it lets go. It isn’t a sign of recovery. It can be a gift — a last real conversation, a last moment of connection — if you know how to receive it as such rather than as cause for false hope.

I wish someone had told us all of this before we walked into that room. I wish someone had sat us down and said: here’s what’s happening, here’s what to watch for, here’s what it means, here’s how you can be present for him rather than just frightened beside him.

That’s what a death doula does. That’s the knowledge that used to live inside communities and families and has largely been lost, and that a growing number of remarkable people are now working to restore.

INELDA and the National End-of-Life Doula Alliance both maintain directories where you can find certified doulas in your area. Death doulas are generally not covered by insurance, which is a policy failure worth fighting about separately, but the field is having conversations about Medicare reimbursement and pro bono work for those who can’t pay. If the financial barrier is real for you, ask; many doulas offer sliding scales or even volunteer their time.

But even if you’re nowhere near this moment in your own life, I’d urge you to read Abramson’s piece in the Post, and to have the conversation with the people you love before it becomes urgent. Talk about what you’d want. Ask what they’d want. Write it down. The conversation itself is an act of love, and it costs nothing except the willingness to be honest about the one thing none of us can avoid.

My father never got to tell us what he wanted, and we never really knew how to ask. That’s a quiet regret I carry. You don’t have to carry the same one.

If this piece meant something to you, please share it with someone who might need it: a sibling, a grown child, a friend whose parent is aging. And if you’ve had experience with a death doula, or wish you had, I’d love to hear your story in the comments.

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Neoliberalism Goes to Work

Neoliberalism has a few primary tenets that are easily identified and make it unique from libertarianism, objectivism and the “conservative” economic policies of the United States in the years prior to the neoliberal Reagan Revolution of 1981. They include beliefs that:

· Controlling inflation is the most important job of federal economic regulation and austerity (a lack of government participation in the lives of its people, particularly in any supportive way) is the best way to get there

· National economies must be deregulated because the market is smarter than government agencies or bureaucrats

· State-owned enterprises, from natural monopolies like city-run utilities and air-traffic control to schools and programs like Social Security and Medicare, must all be privatized; all “welfare” programs must end

· Governments must be shrunk radically, both to decrease their power and to “liberate” corporations and individuals of great wealth to work their “market magic”

· Taxes should be cut to the bone; if the “beast of government” can’t be shrunk, it must be starved

· Markets shouldn’t be centered in or favor any particular nation: the entire world is the “free market” stage on which corporations and morbidly rich capitalists must be free to work their magic

· Property rights are more important than human rights, and racial, religious or gender discrimination or their attendant economic inequalities are not problems to be solved by governments but by “free markets” and the people who dominate those marketplaces

Out of these core tenets come a group of corollaries which, while not often articulated publicly, are the plainly visible outcome of the rapid imposition of neoliberalism. We see these behavior patterns repeated whenever neoliberalism seizes a country, whether it be modest neoliberalism like in the US and UK or “shock neoliberalism” as was imposed in Chile, Iraq and Russia:

· Markets (capitalism) are superior to votes (democracy) so “all necessary steps” are justified to impose neoliberalism on “welfare state” democracies even when the majority of citizens oppose it

· While there can be barriers to the free movement of people between nations, there should be no barriers to the corporate “free trade” movement of goods or money

· Any involvement of government in the lives of its citizens outside of law enforcement and a defensive military inevitably leads to a loss of “freedom” for corporations and the very wealthy and therefore should be ended or privatized

· The family is the best metaphor for governance, with a strong male leader who can overcome the inevitable resistance of what Ayn Rand (who attended a later Mont Pelerin meeting) called “the moochers,” using clear lines of authority and long-established gender roles

· The “welfare state” must be ended; it’s inherently violent and coercive because it’s paid for by taxes taken by the threat of government violence (guns, jails) from well-off people and it also destroys “incentive to work” by providing for low-income people’s basic needs

· Even government functions as widely accepted as licensing physicians are inappropriate interventions in a “free market” (which is why Rand Paul created his very own ophthalmologic “board” to certify his unused medical license)

· Even fascism and oligarchy (as practiced in Chile and Russia on the advice of Milton Friedman’s “Chicago Boys” neoliberals who helped reorganize the economies of both countries) are acceptable alternatives to “welfare state democracy”

· Competition, not cooperation, is the defining characteristic of all truly important human interactions; winners should be celebrated and losers ignored

· Inequality is a sign that society is working as it should because the market rewards the most competent and punishes or leaves behind those not able or willing to carry their own weight

· “Citizenship” is secondary; the citizens of a country should instead be seen and treated as “consumers” because the economy is more critical than the state

· Monopolies are indicators of great efficiency in meeting the needs of the market and shouldn’t be feared or regulated

· Labor unions impede corporate management’s ability to make unilateral decisions and thus are antithetical to a freely functioning economy and a “free” nation

· Controlling inflation is more important than preventing unemployment

· Tax havens and other ways for wealthy people and corporations to avoid “paying their fair share” are an economic and social good because they simply reward hard work and innovation while denying resources to “the beast” of government

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Milton Friedman

The American among the Three Musketeers of neoliberalism was Milton Friedman, who taught for years at the Chicago School of Economics and has become a figure of cult worship on the economic and political right in America.

He was a speechwriter for Barry Goldwater’s 1960 campaign for president, and a formal advisor to, among others, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Donald Rumsfeld (who he pushed Reagan to take on as his VP instead of GHW Bush in 1980).[xli]

Friedman was the functional theologian among the three; he absolutely believed that there was a near-mystical power to unregulated markets and that virtually any sort of governmental intervention in or regulation of the marketplace produced economic distortions that prevented capitalism from working its magic.

When, in his first inaugural address on January 20, 1981, President Reagan said, “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem,” he was merely echoing Friedman.[xlii]

Twenty years earlier, Friedman had watched John F. Kennedy give his inaugural address and cringed when Kennedy hit his most memorable high point.

“In the long history of the world,” Kennedy said, “only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility — I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it — and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.

“And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”[xliii]

Kennedy’s speech sent Friedman into such a paroxysm of fury that he opened his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom by attacking it on page one.

“In a much quoted passage in his inaugural address,” Friedman writes in the opening paragraph of his book, “President Kennedy said, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.’

“Neither half of the statement expresses a relation between the citizen and his government that is worthy of the ideals of free men in a free society. The paternalistic ‘what your country can do for you’ implies that government is the patron, the citizen the ward, a view that is at odds with the free man’s belief in his own responsibility for his own destiny. The organismic, ‘what you can do for your country’ implies the government is the master or the deity, the citizen, the servant or the votary.”[xliv]

Friedman’s devotee Margaret Thatcher famously told Women’s Own magazine in 1987, “And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families, and no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first.”[xlv]

She got it from Friedman’s 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom, whose next sentence after his anti-Kennedy rant was: “To the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them.”

If it sounds like they’re both echoing Jefferson in saying that a government should only function by “the consent of the governed,”[xlvi] they very much are not.

If the “governed” want a social safety net, for example, or want Social Security, a national health care system, or unemployment insurance then, both Friedman, Thatcher and today’s American Republican Party argue, that is something they should be denied because it will lead to communism (Mises/Friedman) or Naziism (Hayek).

Neoliberalism, instead, explicitly demands a “free market” system where all social needs are met by the magical marketplace and the morbidly rich who control it rather than by people banding together and taxing themselves to provide such benefits through government. No matter what percentage of the population likes those “free” things, they all lead, neoliberals will tell you, to bondage.

As Friedman wrote in the paragraph following his anti-Kennedy rant, “The free man will ask neither what his country can do for him nor what he can do for his country.”

Even the most kinds of basic government regulation that most people want will destroy “freedom,” Friedman argued, saying, for example, that even licensing doctors to practice medicine is a step too far.

In his chapter on Occupational Licensure, Friedman writes, “The medical profession is one in which practice of the profession has for a long time been restricted to people with licenses. Offhand, the question, ‘Ought we to let incompetent physicians practice?’ seems to admit of only a negative answer. But I want to urge that second thought may give pause.”

He then goes on to rant about how licensure isn’t about protecting the public but about greedy elites trying to keep “free people” from doing whatever they want while keeping the income for doctors high. This applies, Friedman says, for everything from plumbers’ unions to the AMA.

“The American Medical Association is perhaps the strongest trade union in the United States,” he writes. “The essence of the power of a trade union is its power to restrict the number who may engage in a particular occupation. This restriction may be exercised indirectly by being able to enforce a wage rate higher than would otherwise prevail. If such a wage rate can be enforced, it will reduce the number of people who can get jobs and thus indirectly the number of people pursuing the occupation. … the American Medical Association is in this position.”[xlvii]

And if there’s anything that Milton Friedman wanted to destroy it was trade unions and the government regulation that made it possible for them to legally withstand often-violent assaults from employers.

Along those same lines, in 1946 Friedman got into (metaphorical) bed with Herbert Nelson, “the chief lobbyist and executive vice president for the National Association of Real Estate Boards, and one of the highest paid lobbyists in the nation” and a co-founder of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), which invented the Libertarian Party as a political rationale to deregulate the real estate industry. [xlviii]

No fan of actual government, at least as understood by most Americans, Nelson famously said, “I do not believe in democracy. I think it stinks. I don’t think anybody except direct taxpayers should be allowed to vote. I don’t believe women should be allowed to vote at all. Ever since they started, our public affairs have been in a worse mess than ever.”[xlix]

Friedman co-wrote a booklet for Nelson’s FEE trashing the idea of rent controls titled Roofs and Ceilings. FEE had amassed a multi-million-dollar war chest, according to author Mark Ames, and while the amount Friedman was paid for his work (the FEE ordered a half-million copies printed) has never been disclosed, it represented Friedman’s entrée into the world of big business, which embraced him with vigor.

Friedman jumped right into the fray on behalf of big business, repeatedly arguing that when a corporation put social responsibility over profits it was engaged in the most wicked form of socialism. Regardless of the harm to the environment, workers, society or even democracy, any legal thing a corporation did to increase its profits was necessary to prevent collectivist communism from emerging in America.

As he wrote for the New York Times in 1970:

“[T]he doctrine of ‘social responsibility’ taken seriously would extend the scope of the political mechanism to every human activity. It does not differ in philosophy from the most explicitly collective doctrine. It differs only by professing to believe that collectivist ends can be attained without collectivist means. That is why, in my book Capitalism and Freedom, I have called it a ‘fundamentally subversive doctrine’ in a free society, and have said that in such a society, ‘there is one and only one social responsibility of business--to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.’”[l]

Friedman also believed that because most citizens of developed countries liked their governments regulating things that affected their safety and providing them with a larger social safety net, it’s necessary to either use natural disasters or create crises to bring about the unpopular imposition of neoliberalism. As he wrote in the preface to the 1982 edition of Capitalism and Freedom:

“There is an enormous inertia – the tyranny of the status quo – in private and especially government arrangements. Only a crisis – actual or perceived – ​produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”

Thus was born what author Naomi Klein famously termed “The Shock Doctrine,” the title of her seminal and bestselling 2007 book,[li] laying out how giant corporations took advantage of a wide spectrum of crises, natural and man-made, to eliminate the socially protective functions of government and replace them with neoliberal rule by the rich and the corporate.

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Epilogue

Trump isn’t the first Republican president to have seized the White House by fraud. In fact, the historical pattern is far more disturbing: every Republican president since Eisenhower has either directly stolen the presidency or inherited their position from someone who did.

Nixon started this treasonous tradition in 1968. While President Johnson was desperately working to end the Vietnam War, Nixon secretly sent envoys to persuade South Vietnamese leaders to boycott peace talks, promising them better terms after his election. Johnson discovered this sabotage when the FBI brought him the wiretaps; he confronted Nixon directly, calling it what it was: “This is treason.”1 Nixon’s scheme worked, however, prolonging the war that killed an additional 22,000 Americans and over a million Vietnamese. And Johnson took this crime to his grave; his library didn’t release the tapes for decades.

The pattern continued with Reagan in the election of 1980. As recently confirmed by former Texas House Speaker Ben Barnes, Reagan’s campaign struck a deal with Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini to keep fifty-two American hostages captive until after the election, deliberately sabotaging President Carter’s negotiations for their release.2 The hostages were freed the very minute Reagan was sworn in, and his administration later secretly sold weapons to Iran (leading to the Iran-Contra scandal), thus keeping his corrupt bargain.

George H. W. Bush leveraged Reagan’s illegitimate presidency to get into the White House himself, and then used Attorney General Bill Barr to shut down the Iran-Contra investigation by pardoning six key figures before they could implicate him.3

The Supreme Court handed George W. Bush the presidency in 2000 by halting Florida’s recount, despite Gore winning the popular vote by over 500,000 ballots. A later investigation by major newspapers confirmed Gore would have won Florida under any fair counting standard.4 And let’s not forget that Bush’s brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, purged at least 57,000 mostly Black voters from the rolls just months before the election that was “decided” by fewer than 600 votes.5

Trump continued this tradition in 2016, benefiting from voter suppression orchestrated by Republican secretaries of state and Kris Kobach’s Interstate Crosscheck program that purged millions of legitimate voters—mostly people of color—from the rolls.6 He also benefited from Russian interference through social media manipulation, as documented by Robert Mueller’s investigation.7

Finally, Trump’s payment to silence Stormy Daniels—the crime that Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg successfully prosecuted, leading to Trump’s thirty-four felony convictions for election fraud—was crucial to keeping Trump’s candidacy afloat after the “grab ’em by the pussy” scandal. Without those illegal payoffs violating campaign finance laws and keeping the Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal stories under wraps, Trump almost certainly would have lost to Hillary Clinton.

America has ignored GOP crimes to seize the White House for far too long. Ford’s pardon of Nixon set a destructive precedent of presidential immunity that has echoed through decades, leading to packed courts, unnecessary wars, massive tax cuts for billionaires, and the gutting of America’s middle class.

And now it’s been amplified by six Republicans on the Supreme Court ruling that Trump can commit crimes while in office with relative impunity, an immunity that he’s apparently reveling in.

It’s time to break this pattern and finally hold at least one (convicted) criminal Republican president accountable.

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Hope Is a Discipline

In dark times, hope isn’t a passive emotion: it’s a discipline, a practice we must cultivate daily through action and solidarity, a discipline that keeps us moving forward no matter how hard things get. It keeps us grounded and focused on a positive future.

Mariame Kaba, the prison abolitionist and organizer, puts it perfectly: “Hope doesn’t preclude feeling sadness or frustration or anger or any other emotion that makes total sense. Hope isn’t an emotion, you know? Hope is not optimism. Hope is a discipline. . . . we have to practice it every single day.”26

Given that the enemies of democracy and advocates of authoritarianism are massively well-funded, have been liberated by Republicans on the Supreme Court, and control a large part of our media and social media infrastructure, the path forward won’t be easy. There will be setbacks, moments of despair, and very real dangers. But if history tells us anything, it’s that people facing far worse odds have repeatedly and successfully defended or even brought into being (as our Founders did) democracy against authoritarian threats. If South Koreans could defend their democracy against corruption, if Chileans could end Pinochet’s brutal regime, if South Africans could dismantle apartheid, if America could prevail against the fascists of the Confederacy, then we modern Americans can certainly protect our democratic institutions.

In the famous words of anthropologist Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

The question isn’t whether we can defeat authoritarianism: history both proves that we repeatedly have and that, going forward, we can. The question is whether we will, like our forebearers, again muster the courage, wisdom, and solidarity to do so.

Democracy isn’t just a system of government: it’s a moral commitment to human dignity, equality, and freedom handed down to us by Indigenous people (as I detail in The Hidden History of American Democracy), preserved by generations of Americans willing to fight and die for it. Its defense isn’t just political; it’s profoundly personal and the work that today falls to you and me. Thus, each of us must decide what role we’ll play in this defining struggle of our time.

As you close this book, I hope you’ll carry not just an understanding of the threat we face, but a deepened commitment to the values of democracy that are so worth fighting for, along with a renewed and practical knowledge of how to join that fight effectively.

The future isn’t yet written. It’s created, day by day, via our collective choices. This is why it’s so imperative that each of us make choices that our grandchildren will thank us for.

The billionaire authoritarians and their toadies believe their hour has come. Let’s prove them wrong.

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Remember: The Cost of Forgetting

History shows us that societies that fail to honestly confront (and teach their children about) their darkest chapters are, more often than not, doomed to repeat them. Germany’s unflinching confrontation with its Nazi past—through education, memorials, and legal accountability—stands in stark contrast to Japan’s reluctance to fully acknowledge its wartime atrocities, or to America’s halting efforts to address our legacy of slavery (and the ongoing “Lost Cause” Confederate mythos) as well as the (ongoing) genocide against this continent’s Indigenous peoples.

The consequences of this collective amnesia are all around us, from the Confederate flags on January 6th to the new efforts to strip science and history from our schools. When we fail to teach children about the horrors of the Holocaust, for example, anti-Semitism resurges. When we allow Confederate monuments to stand unchallenged, white nationalism finds fertile ground. When we call January 6th “legitimate political discourse” (as multiple Republican elected officials have done) rather than the attempted coup that it was, we prepare the soil for the next, potentially successful insurrection.

Memory is not passive; it’s an active, ongoing process, because it’s the foundation of our present and shapes our future. As philosopher George Santayana famously noted, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”23 But just remembering isn’t enough: we must draw the right lessons, form the true conclusions, and pass along the honest truths to our children from history.

The most dangerous form of forgetting isn’t complete amnesia, it’s sanitization, where historical atrocities are stripped of their horror and repackaged as noble struggles (as is being done today and has been done for over a century around the Civil War) or unfortunate mistakes (like the way we deal with the lies that led us into Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan). We see this in “conservative” attempts to rebrand the Confederacy as a fight for “states’ rights” rather than to preserve slavery, or in textbooks, stories, and even movies and TV shows (remember the westerns of the mid-twentieth century?) that minimize the genocide of Native Americans as an “unfortunate” consequence of “westward expansion.”

I remember well back in the 1980s when we’d moved to Atlanta from New Hampshire, our first time living in the South. Over dinner one night I asked our son, then in public elementary school, what he’d studied in school that day. “We learned about the War of Northern Aggression,” he told Louise and me to our slack-jawed amazement.

This selective amnesia and its promotion across our nation’s social and political culture isn’t accidental. It’s a deliberate strategy by the beneficiaries of white supremacy and genocide to avoid accountability and perpetuate the systems that help them retain their own power. As journalist Jelani Cobb notes, “When we speak of history, we’re not speaking about what happened in the past. We’re talking about who has the power to define what happened.”24

Authoritarian movements understand this power all too well. Their first target is almost always historical truth, banning books, removing “uncomfortable” topics from school curricula, and attacking archives and academic freedom. The world saw it in Germany, Spain, Italy, and Japan in the run-up to World War II, and is seeing it now in Russia, Hungary, and—tragically—here in the United States. They know that controlling the past is essential to controlling the future. As Hitler wrote in Chapter 10 of Mein Kampf, “The victor will never be asked if he told the truth,” and as he later said in a 1935 speech at the Reichsparteitag, “He alone, who owns the youth, also seizes the future.”

Resisting this erasure requires commitment to what I learned when I lived there in the 1980s, what modern-day Germans call Erinnerungskultur: a “culture of remembrance” that actively preserves memory of historical crimes and treats them not as ancient history but as living warnings. This includes

· Creating and preserving memorials to historical atrocities

· Supporting honest education about our darkest chapters

· Recording and amplifying the testimonies of survivors and witnesses

· Establishing truth and reconciliation processes

· Holding perpetrators accountable regardless of time elapsed

As Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel reminded us, “For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.”25 And we must bear that witness not to wallow in guilt, but to make absolutely sure that “never again” is a lived reality instead of just an empty slogan.

The American experiment has always been, at multiple levels, a contradiction: founded on principles of freedom while practicing slavery, promising equality while enforcing segregation, celebrating democracy while denying the vote to millions. But what has kept our American experiment—the first in the history of the civilized world—alive is our willingness, however halting and imperfect, to confront these contradictions and nonetheless (or even because of them) strive toward that more perfect union that our Constitution’s preamble promises.

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The AI Authoritarian Threat

Pope Leo XIV labeled AI one of the main threats facing humanity, saying it poses challenges to human dignity, justice, and labor.21 He’s right, but it’s even worse than that; AI represents, unless it’s rigorously regulated, a threat to democracy itself.

In every generation, the enemies of democracy change costumes, nations, and languages, but their playbook remains eerily familiar. They lie, divide, intimidate, and exploit every available tool to consolidate power. In the 1930s they used newspapers and radio, in the 2010s it was social media, and now, in 2025, the newest and most dangerous weapon in the authoritarian arsenal is artificial intelligence.

Make no mistake: AI isn’t just another “new technology.” It’s power, scaled. And in the hands of the hard right that is trying to end our republican form of government, it has the potential to become the most effective tool for dismantling democracy ever invented.22

Authoritarians—whether MAGA-aligned in the United States or part of the global movement that includes Putin, Orbán, Modi, MBS, and others—­are not blind to the potential of AI. They understand it instinctively: its ability to pretend to be human, to deceive, to surveil, and to dominate. While progressives and democratic institutions are scrambling to get a handle on its implications, authoritarians in America, Russia, and around the world have already started weaponizing it with devastating efficiency.

A single AI machine can now generate millions of personalized political messages in seconds, each calibrated to manipulate voters’ specific fears or biases. It can (and currently is being used to) create entire fake news outlets, populate them with AI-generated journalists, and flood your social feed or web search with content that looks real, sounds real, and feels familiar, all without a single human behind it. Imagine the power of Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda machine, but with superintelligence behind the wheel and zero friction. That’s where we’re heading in the 2028 presidential election.

And that’s just the beginning.

Authoritarian regimes can—and already are—using AI to surveil and intimidate their citizens. What China has perfected with facial recognition, social media, and loyalty scoring, MAGA-aligned figures in the United States are rushing to adopt and adapt. Right-wing sheriffs and local governments could soon use AI to track protesters, compile digital dossiers, and “predict” criminal behavior in communities deemed politically undesirable. If the government knows not just where you are, but what you’re thinking, organizing, or reading—­and it can fabricate “evidence” to match—freedom of thought (much less freedom of expression) becomes a quaint memory.

This isn’t theoretical. In 2024, Republicans deployed AI-generated robocalls impersonating Joe Biden telling voters to stay home, and millions did. In the next cycle, it’s safe to predict that we’ll see entire portions of election campaigns waged by AI bots masquerading as voters, influencers, news media, and even public officials.

The goal here for the hard right that doesn’t embrace democracy but wants America to become an authoritarian state isn’t just to win; it’s to delegitimize the democratic process itself as Orbán and Putin have done. Because once trust is broken—once people believe that “both sides lie” or that “you can’t believe anything anymore”—then, inevitably (history tells us), strongmen step into the void with promises of order, purity, and salvation.

And when they do, AI will also be there to help them enforce the new “order” in their “orderly society” where dissent has become a crime and fear of speaking out stalks the land.

Imagine a future where police departments outsource their decision-­making to “neutral” algorithms, algorithms coded with the biases of their creators, like Musk is doing by training his Grok AI on X. Where AI-driven court systems deny permits, benefits, or even due process based on Majority Report–style “behavioral profiles.” Where (like in China today) loyalty to the regime is rewarded with access, and dissent is flagged by invisible systems you can’t appeal or even know about for sure.

That’s not democracy. That’s techno-feudalism, wrapped in a red-white-and-blue flag.

If we allow the billionaires who fund the hard right to continue merging political power with unregulated AI, we will see the rise of a system where freedom is algorithmically rationed.

Elections will still happen, of course, but outcomes will be predetermined without our even realizing it. Dissent will still exist, but only in controlled pockets, and it’ll be easy to monitor and suppress through harassment, intimidation, and arrest. History books will be written, edited, and distributed by AI code optimized to tell the oligarch’s story while suppressing the true stories of America (particularly those of racial and gender minorities). In this Brave New America, the “news” will be whatever the regime’s AI decides you should see.

This is not science fiction. It is the logical endpoint of unregulated, authoritarian-aligned artificial intelligence in the hands of unaccountable billionaires and despotic governments.

So what can we do?

To start, we must treat the regulation of AI and the people who own/use/deploy it as a democratic survival issue. That means

· Banning the use of deepfakes in political ads

· Enforcing transparency on algorithmic decision-making

· Creating public, open-source alternatives to corporate-controlled models

· Creating disinformation-catching infrastructure as we would biological or nuclear weapons (that are also not just dangerous, but potentially civilization-ending)

· Demanding that social media outlets publish their algorithms so we can see how we’re being manipulated

And we must do it now.

Because history teaches us that once authoritarianism takes root, it rarely gives up power voluntarily. Particularly when (like with the innovations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) it has new tools that are more powerful than those who would protest and try to defend democracy. The longer we wait, the more embedded, autonomous, and intelligent these systems will become, and the more wealth and power their owners will accumulate. We’re not just fighting bad actors anymore; we’re fighting machines trained by them to think and behave like them.

The battle for democracy in the age of AI won’t be won with slogans or optimism alone. It will take law, oversight, courage, and above all, vigilance. I end every radio show with “democracy is not a spectator sport.” If we want to preserve the sacred right of self-governance we inherited from previous generations, we have no choice but to immediately recognize the existential threat in front of us and act with appropriate urgency.

This time, the fight isn’t just against the usual suspects.

This time, the algorithm is watching.

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Reform: It Wasn’t Just Trump—It Was the System That Fed Him

Donald Trump didn’t emerge from a vacuum. He’s the product of systems—­corrupt, corroded, and increasingly anti-democratic, yes, but systems nonetheless—­that made his rise not just possible but inevitable. If we only focus on removing Trump without addressing the deep corruption of Citizens United and other events and systems that produced him, we’re simply setting the stage for the next authoritarian, who may be smarter, more disciplined, and ultimately more dangerous.

As a result, the deep question that our media almost never mentions is this: can democracy survive when it’s for sale?

Our campaign finance system has effectively legalized bribery through the Supreme Court’s disastrous all-Republican-appointee 5–4 Citizens United decision, which unleashed unlimited corporate and billionaire spending in lobbying and across our elections. As Justice John Paul Stevens warned in his dissent, the court’s ruling “threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the Nation.”11 That prophecy came true with frightening speed as, post-2010, campaign spending exploded.

Billionaires have pumped fortunes into creating an infrastructure that supports authoritarianism, from think tanks that draft corporate-friendly policies, to well-paid media stars and outlets that spread lies and disinformation, to dark money groups that fund right-wing extremist candidates and initiatives.12 These oligarchs and their corporations aren’t investing out of patriotism (although that’s always their claim); they expect returns in the form of tax cuts, deregulation, and policies that increase their wealth and power while attacking dissent and gutting the power of government, workers, and unions.

The result is a political system that only responds to the GOP’s donor class and is openly hostile to the needs of ordinary Americans. As researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page demonstrated in their landmark study, “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.”13

I’ve been running a contest on my radio show for twenty-two years: the winner will identify any one piece of legislation since the 1980 Reagan Revolution that was written by Republicans, passed Congress with a majority of Republican votes, and was signed into law by a Republican president that primarily benefits average working people or the poor instead of corporations or the rich. Nobody has ever won the autographed book I’m offering as a prize.

This system of legalized corruption reaches far beyond mere campaign contributions (although it’s massive there). The revolving door between government and industry lets legislators and bureaucrats who write regulations “fail upward” to extremely well-paid jobs in the industries they once regulated. The growth of this Supreme Court–certified lobbying industry—which now spends over $3.7 billion annually—guarantees that corporate interests are dominant in every policy debate, while people advocating for the public interest are vastly outgunned.14

Media consolidation has compounded these problems. In 1983, fifty companies controlled most of America’s media outlets. Today, just six corporations—­several explicitly right-leaning—control 90 percent of what Americans see, hear, and read.15 This concentration hasn’t just kneecapped journalistic independence; it’s invented “news” designed to maximize profit rather than inform citizens. The result is that facts have become optional, conspiracy theories flourish, and outrage drives decisions made in media boardrooms and editorial production meetings.

Our judiciary, meant by the Framers as, in part, a check on the president’s political power, has instead become a partisan weapon. The billionaire- and corporate-funded Federalist Society has transformed a good number of our federal courts into bastions of pro-corporate, anti-worker jurisprudence. Right-wing judges have gutted voting rights, stripped us of labor protections, and shielded the morbidly rich from accountability, all while spouting bogus, pious claims that they’re merely “originalists” and simply mind-reading the Framers—who were as disparate a group as any you could find today—as they pretend to “interpret” the Constitution.16

When Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, he wasn’t just making routine appointments like most presidents before him who depended on the American Bar Association for guidance; instead, he and Mitch McConnell were completing a decades-long project to capture our nation’s judiciary on behalf of corporations, the rich, and the ideologues of the authoritarian right. These aren’t Trump’s judges, as they’ll long outlive him; they are, instead—since Trump stopped giving the ABA advance notice of nominations in 2017—the billionaire-funded Federalist Society’s judges, vetted and approved by the same dark money networks that have systematically dismantled so many of our democratic guardrails.17

Reforming this system isn’t about winning the next election; it’s about ending our drift toward fascism and returning to the democratic principles laid out in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. This work we’re undertaking requires undoing years of democratic backsliding with fundamental structural changes to revive our democracy. We must

· Overturn Citizens United through constitutional amendment or court reform (or both), ending the fiction that money equals speech and corporations have the same Constitutional rights as people.

· Implement public financing of elections to ensure candidates respond to voters, not donors. Seattle’s “democracy voucher” program offers a promising model, where each voter receives four vouchers worth twenty-five dollars each that they can donate to candidates who agree to lower contribution limits.18

· Break up media monopolies to restore the vibrant, diverse, and independent press that we once enjoyed and democracy requires. In particular, the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which enabled massive media consolidation and let social media sites turn into unregulated propaganda mills, must be replaced with legislation that promotes local ownership, social media responsibility, and journalistic independence.19

· Require algorithmic transparency in social media by reforming or killing off Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act so people can see for themselves exactly how they’re being influenced and by whom.

· Reform the Supreme Court through term limits, enforceable ethical standards, and potentially expansion, restoring its role as a neutral arbiter rather than a partisan weapon.

· Strengthen anti-corruption laws to close the revolving door between government and industry while limiting the influence of big, dark money in lobbying.

These reforms aren’t partisan. They’re pro-democracy. And they’re essential if we want to prevent the next Trump, who will almost certainly be far more effective at dismantling our democratic institutions than Donald, JD, and Elon have been.

The choice before us isn’t between left and right but between democracy and authoritarianism. As the famous conservative Judge J. Michael Luttig recently warned, “America is at war with itself over our democracy” and facing “the most perilous moment for our democracy since the founding of the United States.”20

Democracy can’t survive when it’s for sale to the highest bidder. These reforms aren’t optional; they’re existential.

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Chapter 14: Reform, Resist, and Remember

Resist: How We Defeat Authoritarianism

The day after Donald Trump won the 2024 election, it seemed like every liberal and progressive friend I knew was either talking about moving to Canada or stocking up on canned goods, ready to hunker down for the inevitable descent into authoritarianism.

I get it. After reading the previous chapters of this book, you might feel a sense of hopelessness. The path toward autocracy sometimes seems inevitable because we’ve all seen the pattern repeated in countries that have already fallen. The machinery of oligarchy and autocracy is well-oiled, the morbidly rich are already largely in charge, the courts are captured, the media is under assault, and truth itself—particularly in the increasingly popular right-wing media and on billionaire-owned social media—is more often than not optional.

But here’s our mantra: authoritarianism is not our destiny. Once we realize what’s going on, it becomes a choice, and we can choose to reject it.

These aren’t empty platitudes or wishful thinking. History shows us that authoritarians are often defeated. Fascists can be stopped from within. Democracy, though imperfect, can revive itself even after periods of right-wing darkness.

Consider the examples of South Korea in 2016–2017 and again in 2024. When President Park Geun-hye’s corruption scandal broke in 2016, millions of Koreans took to the streets in peaceful protest. For months, citizens held weekly candlelight demonstrations that drew people from all walks of life. Those protests led directly to Park’s impeachment, removal from office, and later imprisonment. There was a similar reclaiming of democracy when, in 2024, President Yoon Suk Yeol tried to make himself a dictator with state-of-emergency and martial law declarations. Like Park, Yoon was jailed and impeached and democracy has now returned to South Korea.1

Or look at Chile. After seventeen years of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship (installed by Nixon and Kissinger with the help of four American corporations), Chileans organized, mobilized, and ultimately voted him out in a 1988 referendum that he himself had arranged, confident he would win. They defeated him with something as simple as hope, embodied in their campaign slogan “La alegría ya viene” (“Joy is coming”).2

Similarly, in 2022, Sri Lankans from all walks of life—crossing previously unbridgeable ethnic and religious divides—united in peaceful protest to force out the corrupt and authoritarian Rajapaksa dynasty that then ruled their country with an iron fist.3

These aren’t isolated examples. They’re part of a pattern across history: ordinary people, fighting together with strategic focus and moral clarity, can and often do defeat authoritarians.

Understanding the Authoritarian Playbook

To defeat authoritarians, we must first understand their methodology. Their playbook is remarkably consistent across countries and eras:

· Divide the population into “real” citizens versus “enemies of the people.”

· Attack independent media as “fake news.” Corrupt the judiciary to serve power rather than justice.

· Capture electoral systems to ensure they can never lose.

· Militarize law enforcement to protect the regime, not the public.

· Rewrite history to create myths that support their power.

· Use economic anxiety to justify targeting vulnerable groups.

· Co-opt religious and patriotic symbols to present opposition as treason.

This playbook has been deployed in Russia under Putin, Hungary under Orbán, Turkey under Erdoƒüan, Brazil under Bolsonaro, and the Philippines under Duterte, among others throughout the history of the past century.4 And, eerily, these steps are precisely the strategy Trump and his allies tried during his first term and are now pursuing in his second.

But here’s the good news: because the authoritarian playbook is generally consistent, the strategies and methods to fight back can be as well. Successful resistance to authoritarianism, like authoritarianism itself, usually follows patterns we can learn from and appropriate for our own use.

Building the Resistance: Seven Strategies That Work

Looking at the history of successful anti-authoritarian movements around the world, here are seven proven strategies I’ve identified that can help us protect and revive what’s left of our own democracy:

1. Unite across Traditional Divides

Authoritarians often win when they successfully divide the opposition, like Trump is trying to do by getting Americans to hate on their queer, brown-skinned, and well-educated “liberal” neighbors. The most effective resistance movements overcome these kinds of traditional political, ethnic, and social divisions by forming democracy-focused coalitions.

In Poland, as Louise and I learned when we visited in 2024, when the hard-right Law and Justice Party (PiS) attempted to capture the judiciary and media, average people across ideological lines from left to right rose up and fought back. Civil society groups that had historically disagreed on policy set aside differences to defend what was left of their democracy. And it worked. As our guide in Gdansk proudly told us (he’d participated in the street protests and even endured gunfire), that coalition ended eight years of authoritarian PiS rule in 2023.5

And there are signs the same is happening here. Progressives and traditional conservatives are finding common cause in defending democratic norms and institutions as we see with the Lincoln Project and other efforts, embracing the ideals our Founders fought and died for in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. Urban and rural voters are increasingly coming together as we have seen in the regular anti-Trump, anti-fascism demonstrations that have shown up in virtually every town and city in America. All we have to do is set aside our policy differences so we can together preserve the system that makes possible the eventual policy debates we’ll revisit when full democracy is restored.

2. Protect Truth and Information Ecosystems

Authoritarians succeed, as George Orwell pointed out in 1984, when truth is subjective and facts are controlled by the state. Thus, Trump’s power, to a surprising extent, depends on his ability to control information and undermine independent sources of truth. This, of course, is why wannabe dictators always go after media early on.

Today, with right-wing-biased social media algorithms driving hate, polarization, and disinformation to hold eyeballs and increase profits, protecting truth requires both individual and systemic approaches:

· Support independent local journalism through subscriptions and donations.

· Promote media literacy in schools and communities (Finland has pioneered this).

· Create cross-partisan fact-checking organizations and websites that transcend political divides.

· Require transparency of social media algorithms that today profit from division and falsehood.

· Build and elevate media outlets that promote accuracy over eyeballs.

As philosopher Hannah Arendt noted, “Freedom of opinion is a farce unless factual information is guaranteed.”6

3. Defend and Reform Democratic Institutions

Institutions can’t defend themselves: people like you and me must defend our institutions. And to be worth defending, those institutions must serve the people.

For Americans, this means

· Organizing to protect voting rights at both state and federal levels

· Strengthening anti-corruption measures across all branches of government

· Modernizing the Electoral Count Act to prevent future attempts to overturn elections

· Rebalancing power between branches to limit executive overreach

As Justice Louis Brandeis wrote, “If we would guide by the light of reason, we must let our minds be bold.”7

4. Practice Strategic Nonviolence

Nonviolent resistance isn’t just morally superior to violence, it’s also more effective: just ask the followers of Jesus, Mahatma Gandhi, or Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Research by political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan has proven that nonviolent campaigns are more than twice as likely to succeed as violent ones.8

Nonviolent resistance works because it

· Allows broader participation across demographic groups

· Makes it harder for authorities to justify repression

· Causes security forces to question their loyalty to the regime

· Generates greater international support

· Builds stronger democratic foundations for the future

And don’t misunderstand: nonviolence doesn’t call for passive acceptance of authoritarian actions; far from it. Strategic nonviolence includes strikes, boycotts, mass demonstrations, disruption of normal life, direct confrontations with authority figures like ICE, and other forms of direct action that impose real costs on authoritarian regimes.

As civil rights leader Bayard Rustin observed, “The only weapon we have is our bodies, and we need to tuck them in places so wheels don’t turn.”9

5. Build Alternative Power Structures

Successful resistance movements don’t just protest; they demonstrate the future by building better models of governance and making communities more resilient against authoritarian control.

For Americans facing incipient fascism, this means

· Strengthening local groups that directly address community needs

· Building worker cooperatives that model small-d democratic economics

· Creating community media including websites, podcasts, and low-power FM stations that provide reliable local information

· Participating in local government in ways that increase participation and transparency

· Supporting faith communities and civic organizations that become local centers and thus foster social cohesion

· Fielding a “shadow cabinet” filled with Democrats and Republicans who are committed to democracy and positive governance

These structures serve two crucial functions: they meet immediate needs, making resistance sustainable, and they prefigure the democratic society we’re fighting to both preserve and create.

6. Engage Internationally

Authoritarianism is both an ancient and a global phenomenon, which is why resistance movements must be global as well. Successful efforts build international connections that provide support, resources, and can offer protection or even places to flee if necessary.

For Americans, international engagement means

· Building solidarity with democracy movements worldwide

· Learning from successful resistance strategies throughout history and in other countries

· Creating transnational efforts to regulate global platforms like social media

· Supporting international institutions that uphold democratic norms, from the UN to the International Criminal Court

The United States has often positioned itself as democracy’s defender across the world. Now, ironically, Americans need to learn from democratic defenders in our own history and elsewhere.

7. Prepare for the Long Struggle

One of the most important lessons from successful resistance movements throughout history is that defeating authoritarianism is not a one-off, single-­event victory but a long-term process requiring sustained sacrifice and persistence.

South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle lasted decades. Poland’s Solidarity movement faced years of setbacks, including martial law, before achieving democracy. Chilean resistance to Pinochet suffered seventeen years of brutal repression before his removal.

Now that Trump and his allies are entrenched in our governmental, political, media, and economic systems, Americans must prepare for a marathon, not a sprint. This means

· Developing sustainable activism practices and communities that prevent burnout

· Creating intergenerational movements that pass knowledge to younger activists

· Building infrastructure for long-term organizing beyond election cycles

· Celebrating small victories to maintain morale during difficult periods

· Articulating a positive vision that sustains hope through dark times

As Czech dissident Václav Havel wrote during his country’s darkest period: “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”10

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Chapter 13: The Empathy Deficit

Democracy’s Essential Ingredient

In January, as another brutal Maine winter gripped the Northeast, Dwayne LaBrecque faced an impossible choice. The diabetic father of five, who’d lost several toes and part of his foot to infection, stared at his most recent heating bill with a growing dread. After losing his job as a shipping manager, Dwayne’s income had collapsed.1

For years, he’d relied on LIHEAP—the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program created by Congress in 1981—to keep his family warm through Maine’s harsh winters. But soon after his inauguration, Trump and congressional Republicans had put LIHEAP on the chopping block.

“If the president turned around and did away with that funding,” Dwayne told a local reporter, his voice breaking, “I have no idea how we’d survive the winter.”

His story isn’t at all unique. Across America, literally millions of families face similar crises every year, from heat to food to housing to medical and school bills, as the Trump administration dismantles the safety net that has protected vulnerable Americans for generations. But what strikes me most isn’t just the policy change; it’s the profound empathy deficit that enables it.

During my years rostered as a psychotherapist back in the 1980s, I learned that there’s a subset of humanity—roughly 1.5 to 4 percent of the general population—who lack the neurological or psychological ability to experience empathy. These individuals, often described clinically as sociopaths or psychopaths, process others’ pain in a purely intellectual way. They recognize suffering but feel little to nothing in response. No emotional twinge, no discomfort, no moral imperative to help.

While they represent a small fraction of the general population, they account for about one-third of our prison populations, commit roughly 90 percent of America’s violent crimes, and—most relevant to our current situation—are approximately 21 percent of all corporate CEOs.2 This last statistic helps explain how the American government, with big money from these CEOs following Lewis Powell’s infamous 1971 memo, has been transformed from an institution dedicated to the common good into something that increasingly resembles a corporate boardroom where human suffering is just an externality to be managed.

This mindset has now infected our entire system of government. It’s why Trump gleefully kept Kilmar Abrego Garcia in an El Salvadoran concentration camp even in defiance of a Supreme Court order to release him. It’s why he and his Project 2025 architects dismantled programs that helped vulnerable Americans without a twinge of conscience.3 It’s why his administration can watch climate disasters devastate communities while simultaneously rolling back environmental protections and gutting FEMA. This isn’t just partisan policy disagreement; it’s an empathy deficit elevated to governing philosophy.

This lack of empathy gets philosophical backing from figures like Nietzsche and Ayn Rand, both favorites among Republicans and Libertarians who view compassion as weakness. Nietzsche famously called pity “a waste of feeling, a moral parasite which is injurious to the health,” while Rand built an entire philosophy around the “virtue of selfishness.” It’s no coincidence that billionaires like Elon Musk—who recently called empathy “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization”—find these ideas attractive. They provide intellectual cover for what is, at root, a profound moral failing.

Yet empathy isn’t a flaw; it’s the cornerstone of civilization itself. It’s the foundation upon which our democratic experiment was built. The Framers understood this, which is why both the preamble and Article I of our Constitution mention the “General Welfare.” Alexander Hamilton noted that “common interest may always be reckoned upon as the surest bond of sympathy.” Thomas Jefferson and James Madison both emphasized that government must serve more than just the powerful.

As I detailed in The Hidden History of American Democracy, concern for every community member is what led tribal people around the world to create largely egalitarian political structures throughout prehistory, structures on which we based our own Constitution. Margaret Mead noted this, pointing out how the evidence of healed bones was a surefire sign that prehistoric people didn’t leave their injured members to die but nurtured them back to health, even though the time and effort may have represented a risk to the tribe. Empathy built America and has guided our progress, in fits and starts but nonetheless generation by generation, toward a “more perfect union.”

When this essential quality of empathy vanishes from governance, democracy itself begins to collapse. A nation without empathy isn’t really a nation at all; it’s just a crime syndicate with a flag and army, a conspiracy to use the powers of government—the only institution that can legally deprive us of our freedom or even our lives—to elevate the powerful while crushing the weak. This ultimate expression of governmental sociopathy is called fascism, oligarchy, or authoritarianism. But whatever the label, the substance remains the same: rule by those who view human suffering as abstract and simply an acceptable price to be paid for wealth and power.

This is precisely what we’re witnessing now. As Trump implements Project 2025’s blueprint for dismantling the administrative state, each policy change reflects not just different priorities from America’s historic values, but a fundamentally different conception of what government itself is for. Instead of an institution that protects the vulnerable and promotes the general welfare, Trump views our government as a weapon to reward friends, punish enemies, and enrich the already wealthy, a machine of sorts for transforming public resources into private gain.

Dwayne LaBrecque feels this transformation most acutely. For him, LIHEAP wasn’t an abstract budget line; it was the difference between his family sleeping in warmth or shivering through another Maine winter. But in an administration where empathy is viewed as weakness, Dwayne’s suffering simply doesn’t matter.

Why It Matters

This is the deepest danger of Trump’s second term. Beyond specific policies, beyond institutional damage, he shows us what it looks like when sociopathy becomes a governing philosophy, a view of politics where the vulnerable aren’t citizens deserving protection but “useless eaters.”

Democracy can’t survive this sort of empathy deficit, as Franklin D. Roosevelt pointed out when he said, “Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.”

But as we’ll explore in the next chapter, this isn’t inevitable. Resistance remains possible. Reform is achievable. The democratic ideal of our Founders and most presidents since that time—a government of, by, and for the people—still lives in the hearts of millions of Americans who refuse to accept a nation without empathy.

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Chapter 12: The Nightmare Scenario

Louise and I watched on MSNBC as President Trump, on April 9, 2025, signed executive orders targeting two former officials who dared to defy him during his first term.

“I think he’s guilty of treason, if you want to know the truth,” Trump said as he signed an order stripping security clearances from Miles Taylor, the former Department of Homeland Security official who had written critically about the Trump administration under the pen name “Anonymous” in 2019.1

Next came an order targeting Christopher Krebs, whom Trump had fired by tweet in November 2020 when, as director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA, now gutted by Musk), Krebs had declared the 2020 election was “the most secure in American history” and refuted Trump’s claims of fraud. In an act of pure malice, in April 2025 Trump stripped Krebs of his access to the Global Entry system that lets people speed through Customs when entering the United States.2

But these orders went far beyond those two men. The presidential memoranda also suspended clearances for any individuals associated with them including employees at SentinelOne, the cybersecurity company where Krebs worked, and personnel at the University of Pennsylvania, where Taylor had served as a lecturer.3

As Trump called Krebs a “wise guy” and a “fraud,” Louise turned to me with the same look of dismay I’d seen on January 6th four years earlier.

“This is only the beginning, isn’t it?” she asked.

I nodded grimly. This wasn’t just about Trump settling scores: when vengeance drives policy, democracy doesn’t just weaken; it can die.

“I Am Your Retribution”

People often asked me on my radio show in the months leading up to November 2024: “What’s the worst-case scenario if Trump wins again?” That question is now, of course, moot. The worst-case scenario so many of us feared is unfolding in front of our eyes.

That sounds hyperbolic, I know. Americans have a hard time imagining that our system could fundamentally break. We’ve survived a Canadian/British invasion, a Civil War, two World Wars, the Republican Great Depression, and countless other crises with our constitutional framework intact. Surely, people say, we can survive one man.

But Trump isn’t just any man: he’s uniquely dangerous in American history. Unlike previous presidents who at least felt constrained by democratic norms, Trump—as we saw in Chapter 3—has built his entire identity on the performance of success rather than its substance. His presidency isn’t about governance but about maintaining the illusion of winning at all costs.

And as we explored in Chapter 2, Roy Cohn taught him that institutions exist not to serve the public but to be weaponized against enemies. Trump combines these lessons with a complete immunity to shame that makes traditional accountability impossible.

This is the pattern constitutional scholars like Kim Lane Scheppele have documented in countries where democracy has been destroyed by elected leaders who quickly became autocrats. “Modern autocracy comes through legal means,” explains Scheppele, who studied Hungary’s constitutional decline under Orbán. “Democratic institutions are hollowed out from within while maintaining a democratic façade.”4

Trump’s first term was just the dress rehearsal, a testing of boundaries, a probing of weaknesses. He was learning. His current term is now the main performance: systematic, strategic, and utterly transformational. Unlike other presidents who grew into the office, Trump—shaped by the Queens upbringing we examined in Chapter 1—sees governance solely through the lens of domination. He told us exactly what he planned to do. Now he’s doing it.

“In 2016, I declared I am your voice,” Trump thundered at CPAC in March 2023. “Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”5

That wasn’t just campaign rhetoric. It was a mission statement from a man who, as we’ve established, views every relationship as transactional and every institution as a potential weapon. Now, in his second presidency, he has fewer constraints than ever before.

No More Adults in the Room

During Trump’s first term, his most dangerous impulses were usually thwarted by staff who quietly ignored orders, slow-walked directives, or even leaked plans to the press. We know this not from conspiracy theories or news reports but from the people who were there.

General Mark Milley, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told associates after the 2020 election, “They may try, but they’re not going to fucking succeed” in using the military to stay in power.6 Chief of Staff John Kelly, Defense Secretary James Mattis, and others formed what anonymous officials called a “guardrail” around the president.

In his current term, those guardrails have been systematically dismantled, including the mass decapitation of senior levels of our military.

In April 2023, Trump’s inner circle helped draft a 920-page manifesto called “Project 2025,” published by the Heritage Foundation but crafted by dozens of former Trump officials. This document, billed as a “mandate for leadership,” provided a step-by-step plan for consolidating power and neutralizing opposition that Trump is now implementing.7

The endgame isn’t policy. It’s power: unchecked, unaccountable, and wielded for personal gain and vendetta.

The Department of Retribution

The Justice Department was the first institution Trump transformed during his current term.

He’d made no secret of his intentions: He repeatedly promised to use the DOJ against his enemies, calling for the prosecution of those who investigated him. “They should be prosecuted for what they’ve done,” he said of Special Counsel Jack Smith and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. “They’ve violated the Constitution. . . . they’re trying to interfere with an election.”8

Project 2025 called for removing independence from the Justice Department and placing it directly under presidential control.9 The goal? To institutionalize this corrupt vision. And, sure enough, in Trump’s second term the DOJ has been weaponized. We are seeing:

· Prosecutors who investigated Trump facing retaliatory investigations

· Witnesses who testified against Trump losing security clearances, as exemplified by the April 9, 2025, executive orders

· January 6th insurrectionists receiving pardons while peaceful protesters and students who write op-eds face federal charges

· Critics like Krebs and Taylor targeted for official punishment, with their colleagues and associates also penalized10

This isn’t speculation; it’s what’s happening right now. Trump’s April 9th executive orders targeting Krebs and Taylor were the opening salvos of a broader campaign that we can expect to last—and get progressively more aggressive—for his entire four years.11

The End of Free Elections

Trump’s most dangerous fixation isn’t on personal enemies: it’s on the electoral system itself.

After all, Trump’s greatest grievance isn’t that he lost in 2020. It’s that he was stopped from overturning the results. He promised that next time, he wouldn’t be. Now, in his current term, he’s making good on that promise.

The infrastructure for election subversion has been under construction for years. Since 2021, Republican state legislatures have passed dozens of laws restricting voting access, particularly in methods and communities that tend to vote Democratic. But more ominously, many of these laws also change who counts the votes, replacing independent election officials with partisan appointees willing to overturn results.12

In Trump’s current term

· Election rules are being rewritten to favor Republican voters and suppress Democratic ones.

· The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division has been neutered, eliminating federal protection for voting rights.

· State legislatures are being encouraged to override popular votes if they don’t like the results.

· Voter roll purges, gerrymandering, and ID restrictions have exploded, particularly in Republican-controlled swing states.

· Election officials who resist are being replaced with those willing to “find votes” when needed.

The Voting Rights Act—already weakened repeatedly by Republicans on the Supreme Court—is being further gutted through DOJ non-enforcement. Federal election observers are being pulled from problematic jurisdictions in former Confederate states. And the president’s bully pulpit constantly undermines faith in elections themselves.

As Trump himself said during his campaign: “The only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged.”13 That wasn’t just a prediction: it was a threat. Either he wins, or the system is corrupt. There is no room for legitimate defeat in Trump’s worldview.

And now that he’s won a second term, what’s to stop him from seeking a third? Or a fourth? The Twenty-Second Amendment limits presidents to two terms, but with courts increasingly packed with Trump appointees, a DOJ that serves his interests rather than the law, and a Republican Party that has abandoned principle for power, who will enforce this constitutional limit?

Already, Trump allies are floating trial balloons. “His first term was stolen by the Russia hoax and impeachment,” one prominent supporter recently argued on Fox News. “The Constitution should count from his first legitimate term—which is this one.”14 Others suggest that “national emergencies” might require “temporary postponement” of the 2028 election.

Once democratic guardrails are removed, they don’t easily return.

Red Caesar: A Dictator by Another Name

Trump’s authoritarian aspirations aren’t hidden: they’re increasingly celebrated by his intellectual vanguard.

A growing movement within conservative circles, from Claremont Institute scholars to Project 2025 planners, explicitly calls for a “Red Caesar”: an American strongman who rules through emergency powers, bypassing democratic constraints in the name of fighting what they see as cultural decay and internal enemies.

What makes Trump uniquely suited for this role is precisely what we explored in Chapter 1: his family dynamics shaped him to view the world entirely through hierarchies of dominance and submission. As we saw, Fred Trump taught his son that kindness was weakness and that the world was divided simply into “killers” and victims. This worldview—that all human relationships are zero-sum power struggles—is the perfect psychological foundation for an American Caesar.

The mansion in Queens where Trump was raised operated on a value system of acquisition, dominance, and zero-sum competition that stood in stark contrast to the social evolution happening in America during Trump’s formative years. While the civil rights movement, feminism, and counterculture were reshaping society toward greater equality and social justice, the Trump household remained frozen in time.

As clinical psychologist Mary Trump described in her book, which we explored in Chapter 1, her uncle Donald’s personality was formed in response to an “emotional desert”: his grandiosity, his need for constant validation, his inability to admit mistakes, and his casual cruelty all adaptive responses to a psychopathic father who viewed vulnerability as unforgivable weakness.

These childhood lessons have now found their most dangerous expression in his approach to governance, where cooperation is seen as weakness and institutions are viewed not as guardrails but as obstacles to be overcome or weapons to be wielded.

And they’re saying the quiet part out loud. JD Vance, now Trump’s vice president, has argued that a president should “seize power” from the bureaucracy and ignore court rulings that limit executive authority. He promotes the apocryphal story that President Andrew Jackson told Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall to enforce his own order with regard to the Trail of Tears and then ignored the ruling.15

Trump himself has embraced this rhetoric of emergency powers while ranting about supposedly existential threats. “We will root out the communists, the Marxists, the fascists, and the sickos that live like vermin in our country,” he declared in October 2023.16

When a leader compares his opponents to “vermin” who need to be “rooted out,” history leaves little doubt about what comes next. This language isn’t accidental: it’s deliberate signaling about who belongs in Trump’s America and who doesn’t. Who deserves protection and who deserves punishment.

Trump doesn’t need to declare himself a dictator. He simply needs to act like one as long as no one stops him.

The Hungary Model: How Democracy Dies While Life Goes On

In July 2022, CPAC met in Budapest, with Viktor Orbán receiving a standing ovation for declaring that if the GOP wanted real power they had to seize control of the media, the courts, and embark on institutional restructuring. This wasn’t coincidence; it was acknowledgment that Hungary had become the Republican template for America’s potential transformation.17

Having been there and reported from there, I can testify that what makes the Hungarian model so dangerous is how normal it feels to citizens living through it. As Scheppele explains, “The case of Hungary shows how autocrats can rig elections legally, using legislative majorities to change the law and neutralize the opposition at every turn.” Most critically, “it happened through paperwork” rather than violence.18

This is the “frog in boiling water” phenomenon where democracy dies incrementally while daily life continues. People still work, shop, watch sports, and post on social media. Each restriction seems minor until suddenly, they’re not. At first, only critics and targeted minorities feel the full weight of autocratic power, creating powerful incentives for self-^­censorship among the rest of the population.19

The steps Orbán followed have become America’s road map:

· Courts captured through systematic appointments

· Election rules reshaped to favor one party

· Media controlled through regulatory pressure

· Constitutional norms eroded systematically

· Society divided into permanent in-groups and out-groups20

As rights disappear, expectations shift. What once seemed outrageous becomes normal. The psychological accommodation happens gradually, with cognitive dissonance leading many to justify the new reality rather than resist it.21

This pattern is unfolding in America today, and, like in Hungary, it’s a transformation by paperwork, not violence; it’s happening while life appears normal. Until it doesn’t.

The Compliance Apparatus

Beyond individual retribution, Trump has created institutional mechanisms to enforce loyalty. The blueprint had already been tested in states like Florida, Texas, and in Hungary under Orbán.

· Universities now face funding cuts for teaching “anti-­American” ideas (defined as criticism of Trump or conservative orthodoxy).22

· Media companies face regulatory harassment, antitrust investigations, and they and their reporters and commentators are the victims of libel lawsuits.23

· Social media platforms have been given a choice: remove “anti-Trump” content or lose profitable Section 230 protections.

· Federal employees undergo “ideological vetting” with those deemed “woke” or “liberal” purged.

· Private companies face pressure to fire or blacklist Trump critics.

This system of enforced compliance doesn’t require new laws, just the selective enforcement of existing ones. In autocracies, regulatory agencies become weapons aimed at enemies and shields protecting allies.

· The IRS audits Trump critics while ignoring allies’ tax law violations.24

· The FCC targets networks like CNN and MSNBC with regulatory harassment while giving Fox News and right-wing media a free pass.25

· The SEC investigates companies that speak out against Trump’s policies while fast-tracking approvals for supporters.

· Even local police departments feel the pressure, with federal grants tied to their willingness to crack down on protests against Trump while the general right-wing tilt of police departments mean they often ignore violence by his supporters.

This targeted enforcement creates a society where the law no longer protects everyone equally; it protects those in favor and punishes those who aren’t.

The International Warning Signs

On the international front, the warning signs provoked by Trump’s embrace of fascist regimes around the world are already flashing red. NATO allies are voicing concerns about the future of the alliance. Ukraine’s government is desperately seeking assurances that American support will continue. Taiwan is accelerating its defense preparations as China watches developments in Washington.

These aren’t speculative scenarios; they’re the active, real-time responses of global actors to America’s democratic instability. In diplomatic channels and across international forums, frantic discussions are taking place right now about how to adapt to a “post-American global order.” Some countries are hedging their bets, strengthening ties with China and Russia as insurance against US withdrawal from the worldwide family of democratic nations.

Trump’s first term demonstrated his willingness to break with long-standing allies and embrace dictators. His current actions—praising Putin amid Russia’s ongoing war, questioning NATO’s relevance, and suggesting greater accommodation with authoritarian regimes—signal a continuation and acceleration of that approach.

Why It Matters

In a true democracy, to paraphrase Reagan, elections have consequences. When power changes hands, policy changes too. But what happens when the system is rigged so thoroughly that elections no longer meaningfully transfer power?

Consider what’s happening in America today:

· State legislatures, gerrymandered beyond accountability, are passing laws giving themselves more power over election administration.

· The Supreme Court has already ruled in favor of expanded state legislature authority over elections, with more cases pending.

· Voter ID laws, purges, and other restrictions are being implemented with increasing precision to target Democratic-leaning demographic groups.

· Media ecosystems continue to fragment, with Americans increasingly consuming entirely different sets of facts based on their political alignment.

· Corporate money in politics is reaching unprecedented levels, with policy outcomes increasingly aligned with donor preferences rather than public opinion.

These aren’t hypothetical future scenarios; they’re underway right now. The machinery of democracy isn’t destroyed overnight; it’s recalibrated day by day. You can still cast a ballot. You can still enter a voting booth. But the system itself is being restructured to ensure predictable outcomes.

This is how America could see its last genuinely democratic president, not through the abolition of elections, but through their transformation—­like in Russia—into ritualistic exercises that no longer determine who holds power.

For Americans who grew up in a stable democracy, this collapse probably seems unimaginable. But history teaches us that democracies don’t usually die through military coups or dramatic upheavals. They die through step-by-step legal erosion, with elected officials and their bureaucrats and judges dismantling checks and balances while maintaining a façade of legitimacy.

It happened in Hungary under Orbán, in Venezuela under Chávez, in Turkey under Erdoğan, in Russia under Putin. Each began with democratic elections. Each ended with rigged systems where opposition became functionally impossible.

And each happened to a population that couldn’t imagine losing their freedom until it was already gone.

According to Scheppele, the warning signs were clear in Hungary. “For a while, I thought, ‘This would never happen here,’ ” she explained in a 2022 interview. “The biggest mistake that I made was a failure of imagination.”26

Democracy doesn’t announce its departure with trumpets. It slips away in silence, one compromised institution at a time. And Trump—backed by billionaires, amplified by right-wing propaganda networks, funded by foreign oligarchs, and protected by a captured party—has both the means and the motive to make America the next democracy to fall to secure his own safety and wealth.

The endgame isn’t conservatism. It isn’t, in fact, policy at all. It’s a complete restructuring of American governance to ensure permanent rule by a single leader and party. It’s the potential end of the American experiment in regular and peaceful transfers of political power.

This isn’t about left versus right anymore. It’s about democracy versus authoritarianism. And if we don’t recognize this reality soon, Trump may not just be serving his second term: he could be laying the groundwork to become America’s last democratically elected president.

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Part IV: The Last American President

May 2, 2025, was a bad day for the news. Trump proudly announced his executive order kneecapping NPR and PBS, both trusted sources of independent journalism, in a brutal rhetorical attack.1

“Government funding of news media in this environment is not only outdated and unnecessary but corrosive to the appearance of journalistic independence,” he declared as he signed the order requiring the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) to “cease federal funding for NPR and PBS.” And then came the slap, the insult that followed the injury, as he claimed that both outlets received “tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds each year to spread radical, woke propaganda disguised as ‘news.’ ”2

Trump’s message was clear: NPR and CPB had failed the sycophant test and were being used as a vehicle to indirectly threaten any other media outlet that was similarly independent.

This executive order followed, by just a few days, an attempt by Trump to fire three board members of CPB; the news organization fought back by launching a lawsuit to protect its funding and independence. But after lawsuits against all three major TV networks and MSNBC and CNN, along with an FBI investigation into the publisher of Politico for printing an article comparing Donald Trump Jr. to Hunter Biden, the message is unmistakable: speak out against Trump or his administration and there will be a price to pay.

You could call it democide by intimidation.

In the first three parts of this book, we’ve traced the making of Trump, including how his father and Roy Cohn taught him to be a “killer” with little regard for the rule of law. Billionaires, massive corporations, and dark money networks funded his rise, along with help from foreign governments hostile to democracy.

He rose to power by repeatedly appealing to the worst in us, including racism, xenophobia, and misogyny. And now, as dictators and wannabe dictators around the world enthusiastically watch, he’s taking steps to dismantle the social welfare state, legal institutions, and liberal democracy Americans of both parties have carefully built ever since the days of the Republican Great Depression.

So, now comes the work before us, the necessity of confronting the authoritarian playbook that’s worked so well in Russia, Hungary, Egypt, Turkey, and so many other countries around the world.

DOGE is deconstructing our federal government at the same time Trump is cozying up to some of the world’s most brutal dictatorships. Senior officials in the administration defend indefensible practices like ICE agents hiding their faces, refusing to identify their agency, and arresting people without court-signed warrants.

But it’s important to realize that authoritarians fear the power of ordinary people more than they do armies, and that’s us, you and me. History shows that the fatal weakness of dictators and those who want to become dictators is their dependence on our silence, our compliance, and their ability to throw people into despair and silence.

Thus, there’s hope. From the streets of Seoul to the town squares of Santiago, from the Solidarity movement I met with in Poland in 2024 to the mothers of the disappeared in Argentina, we’ve seen democracy repeatedly strike back against what first seemed to be overwhelming odds.

Will we be the generation that watches democracy die, or the one who fights like hell to save it?

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